How to find the original Bitcoin manifest on your Mac
An Apple developer put one of the strangest Easter eggs hidden in macOS, offering a surprising and confusing connection between the Cupertino tech company’s main operating system to everyone (smallest) favorite cryptographic digital currency.
On his Waxy.org blog, technology developer Andy Baio reported on Thursday that he made a surprising discovery, finding that the original bitcoin whitepaper written by the assumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto had been pushed into every copy of macOS since 2018. The document, titled Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system, was first published in 2008 and described how to set up access to and mine the blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Just a year later, the person under the Nakamoto name launched the first version of the bitcoin network.
Any device running macOS Mojave 10.18 or later can access the document. Users wishing to access the document need only open a macOS terminal and type:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
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Gizmodo confirmed that the document appeared when previewed on a MacBook Air running macOS 12.5.1 as well as more modern versions of the OS. The document is stuffed deep into the operating system’s resources, requiring the Virtual Scanner II image capture device. MacRumors suggested that it could be a sample document for the system that could power Macs traits allows users to transfer photos from iPhones or iPads to Macs, although iCloud is a much simpler option for data transfer.
The whole thing is a bigger mystery, since Joshua Dickens, a former product designer at Apple, in 2020, tweeted about the whitepaper. He also found a strange image in the resource folder, which California-based photographer Thomas Hawk claimed was a sign from Treasure Island in San Francisco that he retrieved in 2018.
Gizmodo reached out to Apple for comment, but we did not immediately hear back. Users on Apple’s own forums pointed out the irregularities of the Virtual Scanner II device back in 2021, although no Apple representative ever commented.
Baio further claimed based on an anonymous source that someone at Apple had filed the document as a problem almost a year ago, but that the problem was assigned to the same engineer who originally installed the document into the operating system. As is clear from the White Paper’s continued existence, nothing has really changed in that time.
It certainly makes sense that there could be a developer at Apple who used the bitcoin white paper as a test for one of the macOS backend scanning systems, and then just put it in the code where no one was looking. Nevertheless, it political environment around cryptocurrencies is not exactly stable, especially as crypto hacks, robberies and other crimes have expanded even as Bitcoin prices fell sharply last year compared to peaks in 2021.
There is still quite a bit of speculation as to whether Nakamoto was a real person or, more likely, a pseudonym. Previous investigations by Gizmodo and others have pointed out Australian academic and entrepreneur Craig Wright who was involved in bitcoin’s creation. still, some are still very skeptical that he was behind it alland instead claim other early bitcoin developers as the real minds behind crypto’s nascent beginnings. And making such proclamations hasn’t helped Wright’s wallet either, as he’s had to pay $100 million in compensatory damages to the family of Dave Kleiman, one of bitcoin’s supposed original founders. Kleiman’s brother claimed that Wright cheated the developer out of intellectual property rights for bitcoin.
