A Bitcoin white paper sneakily introduced through every MacOS update since 2018 has been removed from the upcoming operating system update.
Secret “Easter Egg” RemovedAfter facing recent queries, Apple has quietly removed the Bitcoin white paper that was a part of every Mac computer for over five years. From now onwards, the digital whitepaper will not be a part of any operating system updates on the MacOS. Although the whitepaper has been included in every update of the software since 2018, most users were not aware of it till very recently.
It appears to be first noticed by designer Joshua Dickens who discovered it in 2020 and posted about it on Twitter. He discovered that the document was bundled with a test driver for Virtual Scanner II that would allow developers to work with the operating system’s image capture module. Clearly, the files were tucked away in hidden system files and not inteded to be discovered by most regular users. A thread was started on the topic on Apple’s support forums on April 2021. However, most users still remained oblivious about it till more recently, when prominent technologist Andy Baio addressed it last month.
He wrote,
"Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple? Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users."
Many users questioned the tech company about why the Bitcoin whitepaper was included in the updates. The company did not directly address the matter, instead choosing to quietly remove the offending document from the upcoming version of the software update. The removal was first brought into attention by the participants in Apple’s Beta Software Program, who discovered that the upcoming version 13.4 of the MacOS Ventura did not contain the file or any of the elements which it was previously bundled with.
“Inside Joke” Among DevelopersReportedly, Baio later claimed that he was informed that the document was filed as a developer work ticket last year and was assigned to the same person who initially placed it in the system. He claimed that it was supposed to be an inside joke among Apple engineers and there was no underlying meaning behind its inclusion in the software.
Although it is clearly one of the many Easter eggs that Apple developers have hidden in the software, wild conspiracy theorists have not hesitated in proclaiming that Apple’s co-founder and its erstwhile CEO, Steve Jobs (the predecessor of Tim Cook) is the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the unknown creator of Bitcoin.
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