Satoshi Nakamoto's original Bitcoin white paper, Networking seems to be hidden in every modern version of the Apple Mac computer operating system.
Technologist Andy Baio revealed in a blog post on April 5 that a PDF version of the Bitcoin whitepaper "apparently ships with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018."
Baio told Cointelegraph that he “just wanted to fix my printer” and scan documents with a wireless scanner when a device he had “never seen before” called the “Virtual Scanner II” showed up.
By default, Virtual Scanner II displayed a photo, but when Baio changed the media type from “photo” to “document,” Satoshi’s white paper appeared. "I'm not looking for bitcoin papers!" Bai Ou exclaimed. "I just want to fix my printer!" In his post, Baio said "there's almost nothing online about this". He shared a November 2020 Twitter thread from designer Joshua Dickens, who also found the white paper, which Baio used to find the file location.
Baio created a prompt for use in Terminal, a command-line interface for macOS, so others can easily pull up the white paper. "I started asking my other Mac friends if they could confirm, and they all could," he said. “open /System/Library/Image\Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf”
In his blog post, Baio claims that the file can be found in "every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but not in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier."
It's unclear why Satoshi's white paper ships with modern versions of macOS. Baio speculated in his post that it was "just a convenient, lightweight, multi-page PDF for testing purposes and was never intended to be seen by end users."
