Have you ever noticed that macOS takes up a lot of disk space? There’s a lot of code on macOS, and it looks like some of it doesn’t live up to your expectations, as Andy Baio found out earlier this week. On Baio’s blog, Waxy.com, he wrote about discovering Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper hidden in macOS.
The paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” explains the Bitcoin electronic money system and was originally published in 2008. The document has apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018. Why? No one knows. Baio suggests that it was used as a test document.
Baio notes that the “birdie” told him that paper could be removed in a future version of macOS. So, if you want to see it, here’s how.
See the hidden white paper Bitcoin via Terminal
Open the Terminal app (located in Applications > Utilities) and enter the following:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
See the hidden Bitcoin white paper via Finder
Don’t want to use the Terminal? Do the following:
- In Finder, open Go menu and select Go to folder.
- In the Browse to Folder window that appears, enter the following: /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices
- Press the return key. A Finder window should appear with the VirtualScanner application icon.
- Control-click (or right-click) VirtualScanner and select Show package contents.
- The Finder window should appear Content folder. Open it.
- open Resources folder.
- Open (or use Quick Look) the file named simple document.pdf.
The gif below shows how to navigate to the datasheet by opening subfolders.
Foundry
old secret
Although Baio and others recently discovered this, Joshua Dickens tweeted about it in 2020. Dickens also points out that there is an image in the same folder as the Bitcoin white paper that resembles a photograph of Thomas Hawke.
The VirtualScanner material is just one of the hidden mysteries of macOS. Now, if we can only unravel the mysteries of macOS Ventura 13.3…