Blogger Andy Baio discovered an Easter Egg in MacOS. Every Mac since MacOS Mojave from 2018 has a PDF of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper installed in the depths of the file system. Baio stumbled upon this while trying to fix the print function.
Under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto the alleged inventor of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is known, who published the Bitcoin white paper in October 2008 and the first version of the reference implementation Bitcoin Core in January 2009.
Baio’s research confirmed that the Bitcoin PDF is indeed present in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current Ventura (13.3), but not in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier. Golem.de checked this and also discovered the white paper.
Where to find the Easter Egg
The white paper can be found in the Image Capture utility, where it is used as a sample document for a device called Virtual Scanner II. This device appears to be either hidden or not installed by default for everyone.
To see the whitepaper for yourself, anyone interested can open a Terminal window on their Mac and enter the following command:
open /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
On macOS 10.14 or higher, the Bitcoin PDF should open immediately as a preview.
Alternatively, the PDF can also be opened via the Finder. To do this, users need to click Macintosh HD and then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Then, while holding down the Ctrl key, select the VirtualScanner.app file and click the Show Package Contents option. In the Contents→Resources folder is the simpledoc.pdf mentioned above.
Why the PDF is present on MacOS remains unknown. Baio speculates that it is simply a multi-page test PDF document that was never intended for end users. At only 184 KB, the file is also very compact.
In an update to his blog post, Baio wrote that he was slipped information that someone reported the existence of the document to Apple nearly a year ago, the same engineer who put the PDF file there in the first place.
