A digital copy of the original Bitcoin white paper document that had been hidden on Macintosh computers for more than five years is not part of an upcoming Apple operating system upgrade, it reported. AppleInsider on Tuesday.
The belated discovery of the PDF document went viral three weeks ago and represented just the latest in a long line of Easter eggs that Apple (or its employees, more likely) have planted in recent decades. It seems to have slipped under the radar of millions of Apple users until 2020, when designer Joshua Dickens posted about it on Twitter. Someone who read your post started a thread on Apple’s support forums in April 2021.
However, it didn’t garner much more attention until prominent technologist Andy Baio wrote about it last month.
“Of all the papers in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper chosen? Is there a Bitcoin maxi secret working at Apple?” Baio asked. “Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be viewed by end users.”
The discovery even prompted Craig Wright, who has long claimed to be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, to suggest that Apple was violating his copyright. Wright had previously obtained a court order to force the Bitcoin.org website to remove a copy of the document in 2021, but the website refused to comply.
According to Apple’s Beta Software Program participants, the upcoming version 13.4 of MacOS Ventura does not contain the file, or the other items it was initially packaged with, a test driver for a virtual scanner that allows developers to work with the operating system imaging module. The files were never meant to be discovered by average users, as they reside in hidden system files.
Along with the PDF of the Bitcoin whitepaper was a photo of a sign on Treasure Island in San Francisco.
Baio later said that a source within Apple told him that the presence of the document was submitted as a developer job ticket last year and was assigned to the same person who initially put the document on the system. However, at that time, the ticket had not been served.
“They indicated that it will probably be removed in future releases,” Baio said.
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