Bitcoin white paper found hidden inside MacOS

Concealed within Virtual Scanner II is a PDF version of the Bitcoin white paper or the Bitcoin manifesto

Somebody has hidden the Bitcoin white paper inside each copy of MacOS shipped since 2018.

Back in April 2021, a user by the name of bernd178 on the MacOS Community Forum noted that concealed within the Image Capture Utility is a function named Virtual Scanner II, which is not enabled by default.

Concealed within Virtual Scanner II are a nondescript image of a San Francisco bay, and a PDF version of the Bitcoin white paper or the Bitcoin manifesto.

Strangely, there is also a PDF with the original Bitcoin manifesto from Satoshi Nakamoto in the VirtualScanner.app Package Content, according to bernd178.

I find it hard to believe anyone cares, said a user going by the name Barney-15E, in reaction to the post by bernd178.

Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin white paper selected? Is there an undisclosed Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? The filename is “simpledoc.pdf” and it is just 184 KB, according to Baio on Waxy. Maybe it was just an easy, lightweight multipage PDF for testing reasons, never meant to be seen by end users.

There is one more angle to note. Craig Wright has been trying to copyright the Bitcoin white paper and has been suing places that host it but he has not been successful. This may have been an internal act of defiance by a coder working at Apple, a firm too large for Wright to sue.

In February this year, Wright lost a copyright claim in a U.K Court concerning the white paper.

I do not see any likelihood of the law as currently stated and understood in the case law permitting copyright safeguard of subject matter which is not expressed or fixed anywhere, Judge James Mellor then stated in a ruling for the High Court of England and Wales. It remains the case that no relevant ‘work’ has been recognised containing content which defines the structure of the Bitcoin File Format.