Coinspeaker
Bitcoin Whitepaper Removed by Apple from Recent MacOS Beta
The world’s largest tech firm Apple has quietly cleared the Bitcoin white paper from the recent beta version of its operating system upgrade. On April 25th, the Apple-centric news site 9to5Mac claimed that the company had removed a test scanner application called Virtual Scanner II in the recent MacOS Ventura 13.4 beta, and consequently, the Bitcoin white paper vanished.
Several hidden files in MacOS will not open without some particular user action. Previously, Satoshi Nakamoto‘s Bitcoin whitepaper was present in the test scanner application, but the reason for the whitepaper’s location wasn’t known.
The presence of the whitepaper means that it was used as a convenient test file of a small size. The developer creating the test application could have been a Bitcoin investor who added it as a joke.
According to Cointelegraph, a blog post from technologist, Andy Baio disclosed that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper PDF was sent around with every version of MacOS for the last five years.
While this could be attributed to just a joke among the Apple engineers, there are, however, crazier conspiracy theories, like the one where Apple co-founder Steve Jobs actually disguising as Satoshi Nakamoto. However, Apple has now decided to stop carrying on the joke and removed the document from the latest version.
The whitepaper was in a folder in the Image Capture application along with several other random files like PDFs and Images. According to 9to5Mac, this can also mean that the Bitcoin white paper along with its internal tools was never meant to be discovered by customers. The likely explanation is that the engineers in the past did not trouble themselves in removing it as the public release of MacOS did not comprise any sensitive information.
A California court ruling said that Apple violated state competition laws by barring app developers from using alternative in-app payment methods apart from its own, which includes a 30% commission. The court’s decision has made it easy for the cryptocurrency and NFT project undertakings to include more functionality in their iOS applications.
On April 24th, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of Apple v/s Epic Games, upheld the verdict of the lower court from 2021, claiming that Apple’s anti-steering provision assaulted Epic Games. The anti-steering provision is an Apply policy claiming that iOS developers cannot interact with out-of-app methods via specific mechanisms like in-app links.
The policy raised the costs of Epic’s applications that are present on Apple’s App Store and disallowed other application users from becoming Epic Games users.
