Have you ever noticed that macOS takes up a lot of storage space? There’s a lot of code in macOS, and apparently some of it isn’t what you’d expect, as Andy Baio discovered earlier this week. On Baio’s blog, Waxy.com, he wrote about his discovery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper which is hidden in macOS.
The document, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” explains the Bitcoin electronic cash system and was originally published in 2008. The document has apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018. ? Nobody really knows. Baio theorizes that it was used as a test document.
Baio notes that “a little birdie” told him that paper might be removed in a future version of macOS. So if you want to see it, here’s how.
View the Hidden Bitcoin Whitepaper via the Terminal
Open the Terminal app (it’s in Apps > Utilities) and enter the following:
open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
View Hidden Bitcoin Whitepaper via Finder
Don’t want to use the Terminal? Proceed as follows:
- In the Finder, open the Go menu and select Go to folder.
- In the Go to Folder field that appears, type the following: /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices
- Press the Return key. The Finder window should appear with a VirtualScanner application icon.
- Control-click (or right-click) VirtualScanner and select Show package contents.
- The Finder window should show a Content case. Open it.
- Open the Resources case.
- Open (or use Quick Look) the file named simpledoc.pdf.
The gif below shows how to navigate to the whitepaper the long way, by opening the nested folders.
Foundry
Long-held secret
While Baio and others recently discovered it, Joshua Dickens tweeted about it in 2020. Dickens also points out that there is an image that looks like a photo of Thomas Hawk in the same folder as the Bitcoin whitepaper.
VirtualScanner’s content is just one of the hidden mysteries of macOS. Now, if only we could unravel the mysteries of macOS Ventura 13.3…
