Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin, published the Bitcoin white paper in 2008. Illustration of Fortune
On every Mac operating system after 2018, a nine-page PDF is hidden in a pile of folders. This PDF is none other than the Bitcoin Whitepaper, the famous cryptocurrency theoretical outline written by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin.
On Wednesday, Andy Baio, former Kickstarter CTO, was the first to publicly announce that he’d found the tangled PDF after trying to connect a printer-scanner combo to his MacBook.
“I asked over a dozen Mac users for verification, and it was there for every one of them,” he wrote on his blog, which is more than two decades old. He believes that inclusion in the white paper was the work of a single engineer and not an Easter egg decreed from above.
Although Baio has been a techie for decades, it’s relatively easy to find the same document on your own Mac. Here’s how:
use terminal
Every iteration of the Mac operating system has what’s called a terminal, or a way to explore a computer’s file system through text commands. To access Terminal on your Mac, simply go to the Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder and click on it.
Baio wrote a simple command for Mac users to reveal the hidden Bitcoin white paper. Copy and paste the following code into Terminal once it’s open:
Open /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
Use Finder
The more time-consuming approach – but one with a technologically lower bar – is to navigate through the Finder, a Mac’s file management system.
Open a Finder window, navigate to the System Folder, and prepare for a barrage of clicks.
From Systems go to Library, Image Capture and then Devices. Under Devices, right-click VirtualScanner and select View Package Contents. That should open another folder titled Contents, through which you should navigate to Resources, which will show a bunch of files.
Click on simpledoc.pdf and voila! You should finally have reached your destination: the nine-page synopsis detailing Bitcoin’s theoretical specs, a piece of digital dust worth well over $500 billion in aggregate as of Friday afternoon.
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