Well, this is definitey weird.
According to an April 5 blog post from technologist Andy Baio revealed that a PDF of the Bitcoin white paper has “apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”
Baio stated that he was “just trying to fix my printer” and scan a document with a wireless scanner when a device called “Virtual Scanner II” appeared that he’d “never seen before.”
The Virtual Scanner II app showed a photo according to its default setting, but when Baio changed the media type from “Photo” to “Document,” Satoshi Nakamoto’s original white paper describing Bitcoin technology appeared.
Baio later shared a November 2020 Twitter thread from designer Joshua Dickens, who also found the whitepaper, which Baio used to find the file location.
Baio created a prompt to use in Terminal, a command line interface for macOS, so others could bring up the whitepaper easily.
In his blog post, Baio claimed the file is found on “every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.”
It’s unknown as to why Nakamoto’s white paper has been shipped with every modern version of macOS since 2018. Baio speculated in his post that it was “just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
Apple has yet to offer a public statement as to why the file is present.
Via Cointelegraph and @Schwa23