A blogger said he was recently in the process of fixing his printer when he discovered a big surprise in his Mac.
A PDF file of a famous Bitcoin whitepaper was sitting in the system files.
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The blogger, Andy Baio, said it was a copy of Satoshi Nakamoto's document and had shipped with nearly every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.
Nakamoto is the name of the person credited with developing bitcoin, but speculation abounds about his true identity, or whether he is possibly more than one person.
"We've confirmed that the document exists on a fully updated Mac running Ventura 13.3, and Baio says the 184KB PDF file appears to date all the way back to 2018's Mojave (it's not present in 2017's High Sierra)," wrote Ars Technica.
Users who want to check the file out for themselves can open a Terminal and use the following command:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
"The file is included in a system app called VirtualScanner.app. This is almost certainly related to the 'import from iPhone' Continuity Camera feature that lets you insert pictures or documents 'scanned' with your iPhone or iPad's camera directly into a macOS app," Ars Technica said. "That feature was originally introduced in Mojave, the same macOS version that added the Bitcoin white paper."
"Baio says that 'a little bird' told him that the presence of the Bitcoin white paper was filed as an issue internally at Apple 'nearly a year ago,' and that it was assigned to 'the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place,'" according to Ars Technica.
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