Oliver Haslam on April 6, 2023, 4:36 pm

Your Mac Has Had Bitcoin’s Whitepaper Ever Since 2018

Yours and every other Mac has had a copy of the Bitcoin wallpaper installed since 2018 and nobody seems to know what that is the case.

The discovery was made by developer and writer Andy Baio who found the PDF of the whitepaper when trying to fix an ongoing printer problem. That whitepaper appears to be on every Mac from macOS Mojave all the way through the latest version of macOS Ventura, and you can find it yourself by running the following command in Terminal.

open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

Running that should see the document open in Preview, but there is another, Finder-based way of getting to the same document.

If you’re not comfortable with Terminal, open Finder and click on Macintosh HD, then open the System→Library→Image Capture→Devices folder. Control-click on VirtualScanner.app and Show Package Contents, open the Contents→Resources folder inside, then open simpledoc.pdf.

It isn’t clear why the document is there but it appears to have been used as a sample document for Virtual Scanner II, a tool that nobody seems to know all that much about.

This isn’t the first time that the PDF has been found, either. There is mention of it in an Apple Community post from 2021, for example.

The Whitepaper was originally written by Satoshi Nakamoto, but again, nobody knows who they were either. The file isn’t a risk to anyone at least, but we’d all like to know why it’s there.