Happy Easter (egg): Apple hides Bitcoin white paper in macOS (u)

*Update: On 24/4/23, Apple removed the stealthily stored Bitcoin white paper from its systems, crushing yet another macOS Easter egg.

I can’t ignore the irony that as Easter weekend approaches (in some cultures) the Apple world has just encountered a highly unusual Easter egg that has been quietly hidden inside Macs since macOS Mojave. In this case, the egg arguably has something like gold inside, as it’s a copy of the legendary Bitcoin whitepaper.

Satoshi’s big surprise

We don’t know why Apple popped a copy of the white paper insider Macs.

Some speculate the company just wanted some kind of sample PDF document for its OS. The same folder that contains it also contains a PDF called numbers.pdf which contains just four numbers in large type and an image called cover.jpg which appears to have been taken in San Francisco.

So, where is this PDF?

Here’s where it (update: Used to hide and no longer can be found) hides;

• Open Finder>Macintosh HD>System>Library>Image Capture>Devices
• Right click on VirtualScanner.app and chose Show Package Contents
• Now open the Resources folder and click on simpledoc.pdf
• You will see the white paper in its full, confusing, glory.

You can also find it using the Terminal app, just paste the following into the app:

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

This isn’t the only easter egg you’ll find on a Mac.

At one time, if you had Pages installed on your Mac you can find two iconic speeches from Steve Jobs, the Stanford University commencement speech and the text from the acclaimed Crazy Ones speech in the Think Different campaign.

[Also read: Watch 20 of the best ads Apple ever made]

For those at the back of the class, the Bitcoin whitepaper was a really important document written under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto on October 31, 2008 that laid out the basic structure of the Bitcoin network.

We still don’t know who the creator of the document actually was, but it laid out the peer to peer system used in Bitcoin and is considered an essential text.

(Despite which I still believe cryptocurrency values are artificially driven by large investors to augment their own wealth at the expense of smaller investors.)

Happy Easter. Have you come across any other Mac easter eggs on your system?

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