Apple Quietly Removes Satoshi’s Bitcoin White Paper From MacOS ⋆ ZyCrypto

Hidden in all versions of the Apple MacOS since 2018, a copy of the original Bitcoin white paper penned by the pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto will not be part of the next update, Apple-focused news publication 9to5Mac has reported.

As ZyCrypto reported about three weeks ago, a post from prominent technologist Andy Baio revealed that a PDF copy of Satoshi’s Bitcoin white paper had been shipped in every version of MacOS from Mojave to Ventura.

“Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple?” Baio asked on his blog Waxy. “Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”

The document was hidden within Virtual Scanner II, which was not enabled by default. The file went unnoticed by the tech giant’s millions of users and was believed to be a joke among Apple engineers or even included as a subtle endorsement of Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology. It even prompted self-proclaimed (and much-contested) Satoshi Nakamoto Craig Wright, who has long attempted to copyright the Bitcoin white paper and has been suing places that host it, to suggest that Apple was breaching his copyright.

However, Apple has now removed the document from the latest version of the Mac operating system. A look at the Beta Software Program, upcoming version 13.4 of MacOS Ventura, shows it does not contain the entire Virtual Scanner 11 tool, which may have been included in the system for testing purposes. The white paper was located in hidden system files and was not intended to be discovered by everyday users.

“This pretty much confirms our original theory that both the Bitcoin white paper and the internal tool were never meant to be found by regular users,” 9to5Mac observed.

Alongside Satoshi’s white paper was a nondescript image of a sign at Treasure Island in San Francisco.

The enigma surrounding the inclusion and subsequent scrapping of the Bitcoin white paper from macOS remains unanswered. With Apple remaining mum on the subject, the crypto community is left to weigh the implications and the stance of the world’s largest tech company.