The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

[krsdcbl]

Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.

[crazygringo]

Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF".

If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.

[duxup]

Yeah my collection of test docs are pretty random, albeit often Futurama related.

[blatant303]

I've been telling myself I missed the opportunity window in 2012

[tinus_hn]

I would have expected a pdf showing the ‘Here’s to the crazy ones’ poem that’s also in the old TextEdit icon.

[paxys]

> freely distributable

Is it though? The whitepaper wasn't released with any license. The original author still holds the copyright.

I'm going to guess someone from Apple's legal team is pretty pissed right about now.

[danielodievich]

This reminds me of the (encrypted) copy of Microsoft Bob shipping with every Windows XP CD ever https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

[jboy55]

The story mentioned how one of the reasons to put Bob on each CD was to make any download of the ISO longer, since the actual XP data didn't fill the CD's capacity. Someone this conjured a memory of downloading XP/2000 back in the day, when I first got DSL, and how it was almost an hour. I thought that was quick at the time. 1.5mb/s vs 56k and all.

I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 10 seconds. I wonder what 20 years will bring?

[richardfey]

Looking forward to the first serious attempt to decrypt that.

[kurtoid]

404 not found

[paxys]

Better than a U2 album, that's for sure.

[speedgoose]

I still have nightmares about my iPhone and my BMW randomly playing that album with that cover picture when I entered the car.

I sold the car and even had to start iTunes to remove the album.

[ronyfadel]

Seriously who'd have thought that was the worst idea ever?

[newshorts]

I still feel violated everytime it plays on my home pod by accident.

[kinghajj]

Cool, now I can add this to my `~/.bashrc` and easily view the whitepaper whenever.

    btc_wp() {
            open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
    }

[drviewer]

you misspelled ~/.zshrc

[SllX]

Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”

[waxpancake]

I mentioned it in my post: in Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. But that's only possible if the virtual device exists, and it's still unclear why it's hidden for some people but not others.

[cududa]

I think this is for a unit test around scanned documents or something, given the rest of the directory's contents

[hiidrew]

the cover.jpg file is cool, thanks for suggesting this

[nouryqt]

For what it's worth the virustotal page[0] for the sha256 hash[1] of the pdf file has it marked as "File distributed by Apple" so it must have been known for some time now? Would be interesting to know when that notice was added but there is no archive of the site unfortunately.

[0] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/b1674191a88ec5cdd733e424...

[1]b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553

[EamonnMR]

They probably enumerated every file found on a fresh install of MacOS. It's possible no human ever actually looked at and recognized the file.

[monero-xmr]

The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used

[alex_sf]

Really though? I’m confident there are 100 RFCs alone that were more impactful.

[jxf]

Of all time? This almost certainly isn't true. Many treaties, laws, RFCs, and so on would be more impactful than Bitcoin.

Do we really think the Bitcoin white paper is more impactful than, say, the Magna Carta or Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses? I think you might be inadvertently succumbing to recency bias.

[nathanvanfleet]

Yeah man, how much oil has been burned so far!

[kjellsbells]

I'm going to sound like a grouch, but that's not my intention. If the bitcoin PDF was chosen as a test file, it seems far too basic to be a valuable test for an Apple developer to be using (after all, PDFs can be insanely rich) and I have to believe that Apple is full of people that have Adobe on speed dial or are otherwise sufficiently creative to make a nice Apple-grade PDF that stretches the format to its limits.

It's possible that the test file is for an end user to verify function, not an Apple dev, I guess, but then in that case Id expect Apple to provide something much more clear (say, Apple logo with "if u can read this, great" rendered in multiple languages") that supported their aims of branding, lack of legal encumbrance, and international support.

[CGamesPlay]

> A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since.

What an absolutely foolish way to broadcast to your employer that you’re willing to leak information.

[mattl]

Someone looked it up in radar and can confirm that someone else already flagged it as an issue and assigned it to the original developer?

Doesn’t seem like a huge problem. Basically no different to “we’re aware of it”

[chucknthem]

Interesting to see this discovery today on Satoshi's birthday (April 5th, 1975). Also the 90th anniversary of Executive Order 6102.

[cobertos]

Interesting, Executive Order 6102, forcing US and non-US citizens to sell gold at a fixed rate, in order to prevent gold hoarding so the US could meet it's obligations to back it's currency via gold.

Also interesting that it led to the sort of related Brenton Woods system, and all the effects of that and it's de facto ending in the 70s under Nixon

[rzzzt]

"Executive Order 6102", the infamous conversation between Darth Sidious and his Clone Commanders that started the systematic elimination of the Jedi. I remember like it was yesterday...

[lowkey]

6102 reversed is also 2016 which is the number of Bitcoin blocks mined before a difficulty adjustment, interesting coincidence!

[pyinstallwoes]

6102 can be summed to 90

6+1+2=(9)0.

Oh how strange the machine elves churn.

April 5th is also 9. (Month 4 day 5) and guess what…

[xnx]

Every Samsung phone has a hidden picture of a chihuahua: https://lifehacker.com/every-samsung-phone-has-a-hidden-chih...

[ukuuru]

Yes, we have occasional meet ups with him/her; whenever my toddler mashes the phone to the ground.

[gardenhedge]

Confirmed on my MacBook bought in 2015 and on version macOS Catalina Version 10.15.1

Cool.

[flir]

It's on this Mojave 10.14.6 machine too. The internet says that's Sep 26, 2019.

[Animats]

Is there a Bitcoin miner somewhere in there, too?

[indy]

Every iPhone ships with a bitcoin miner. It gets activated once your phone is over a year old.

[quickthrower2]

Well, how much of that M2 chip do you really need for Netflix, bud?

[INTPenis]

Valid questions for any consumer.

I love the comments here all so awe struck by this that they don't realize how stupid it is. Literally any PDF document would have served the same purpose, the printer test page could have been enough. But this just reveals that even deep inside Apple development there are cryptobros who don't mind all the millions of dollars that the whole crypto movement has scammed from hard working gullible people.

[turpialito]

If it had been a document for testing purposes, I think a maths or physics paper with plenty of notation and equations would have been better.

[Geee]

Tim Cook is a known bitcoiner, so it might have approval from the top.

[Mountain_Skies]

Another OS include is that Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme. Wonder if the Bitcoin paper has any function beyond its written content.

[lxgr]

> Microsoft Bob was hidden in the Windows XP install CD, apparently as part of the copy protection scheme.

Only insofar as it made the image slightly larger, making it slower to distribute an ISO image of the CD online. I don't think the installer actually checks its presence or anything like that.

I think macOS has tried something like that though with "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" back in the day (which actually did contain a human-readable poem), but I don't really get the point of all of these attempts – surely the entire operating system is already copyrighted, even if it doesn't rhyme?

[sinoue]

I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster and the whole fiasco of BHA Carl Sagan code names. Easter eggs and codenames were supposed to be fun, not lawsuit material.

[ralfd]

> I still remember the Paula Abdul office background poster

I don't understand this reference and Google leaves me totally blank here. I could ask you to clarify, but there is the chance you don't see it or dont reply so … ChatGPT to the rescue?

-----------

Prompt: What was the Paula Abdul office background poster controversy?

ChatCPT: The Paula Abdul office background poster controversy refers to a incident that occurred during a live episode of "American Idol" in 2009, when fans noticed a poster hanging on the wall behind Paula Abdul's desk during her pre-taped video segments. The poster, which appeared to be of a semi-nude woman, caused a stir among viewers and led to accusations that Abdul was promoting sexual objectification.

Abdul and the show's producers initially denied that the poster existed, but later issued a statement acknowledging its presence and stating that it was not intentionally visible during the broadcast. They also apologized to viewers who may have been offended by the poster.

-----------

This does sound plausible … But wait! Is this truly true or just hallucinated?

Googling "Paula Abdul American Idol" just finds countless gossip posts about an alleged affaire with ex-contestant Corey Clark, but nothing about a poster.

[NKosmatos]

Don’t mind me, I’m here just for the conspiracy theory comments :-)

[hnbad]

Okay, here's my take: whoever put it there held a bunch of BTC at the time and hoped that tech enthusiasts would come across it and get interested, increasing the value of that person's wallet. Alternatively they just needed a PDF for some QA reason and that person just picked the paper as an easter egg because it felt like cool tech lore.

[nothrowaways]

"Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen?" Good question.

[diebeforei485]

This is great! The concept of distributed currencies should be spread as far wide as possible.

[fnordpiglet]

The more obscurely stored the better!

[bdcravens]

How long before Craig Wright, an Australian "academic" who has very dubious claims of being Satoshi and who has attempted to bully via the legal system, claims Apple owes him billions?

[pcthrowaway]

This is great, because he has an obligation to sue them to defend his IP.

And Apple will bury him.

[kris-nova]

I would be willing to wager there is more inside that PDF than just the contents of the Bitcoin white paper. Curious if anyone has a hash sum handy

[greyface-]

  $ wget https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  [...]
  $ openssl sha256 bitcoin.pdf 
  SHA256(bitcoin.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
  $ openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
  SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553

(Ventura 13.3)

[eis]

  md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042
  sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8
  sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553
  size: 184292 bytes

These are from MacOS 10.15.7 The file matches the officially released whitepaper pdf.

[jerrysievert]

Mojave:

    openssl sha256 /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf
    SHA256(/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf)= b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553

[ehPReth]

/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf

sha256: b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553

sha512: 2ac531ee521cf93f8419c2018f770fbb42c65396178e079a416e7038d3f9ab9fc2c35c4d838bc8b5dd68f4c13759fe9cdf90a46528412fefe1294cb26beabf4e

crc32 (lol): 13af7d06

md5: d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042

sha1: 8de2fdb04edce612738eb51e14ecc426381f8ed8

[cududa]

The entire directory is really weird. Looks like some sort of directory of assets for automated testing the data from scanners (like, physical document scanners) returning properly? Built in macOS md5 hash reports the PDF's hash as d56d71ecadf2137be09d8b1d35c6c042

[galaxyLogic]

Why can't they clean up their OS distribution. This kind of content clearly does not belong there at least if it is practically hidden in there. There should be a reason why every file in the OS distribution is there. This kind of looks like Apple does not know what is in their OS. What else is there?

[nier]

«A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.»

Source: https://waxy.org/2023/04/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-is-hidden-in...

[mdmglr]

I said the same thing and HN did not like that.

Not much else. Been using ‘find’ in ‘/System’ and haven’t found anything else that interesting.

[louison11]

It’s a convenient way of backing up the document that can be used to re-create this impactful technology from scratch… may a disaster take place. Think like sending backups of human civilization into space. There are probably now hundreds of millions of copy of this file, pretty cool.

[Skyy93]

Currently the only impact Bitcoin had is burning a large amount of electricity. I would not say this is a particular worthy technology to safe. There would be far better ideas like Transformers in AI or 5nm chip technology.

[am44jnsf]

it's not really hidden, you just didn't know it was there. not the same thing

[freitzkriesler2]

I remember one time installing Bob on a test machine in an IT lab running 32 bit XP. Marvelously it ran, but frustrated my poor coworker who was didn't know what it was.

[supergirl]

I bet it was Satoshi who put this in MacOS. it would make sense if Satoshi was the kind of person to hide in plain sight and leave small traces to find him/her.

[skee8383]

Bag holders are going to try to spin this into a conspiracy theory to pump the value of BTC. Next they will be saying that Satoshi was Steve Jobs or some nonsense.

[eep_social]

18 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35461226

[Im_your_dada]

What if China manufcature added it to test apples security flaws ? How does apple even control that ? This cant be good for apple

[Sevastopol]

You're paranoid.

A manufacturer doesn't need to test anything like this. They already have physical access to the devices before they are even set up.

[berkle4455]

Wait til you realize Satoshi worked for Apple and used stenography to embed his wallet key into that image. The PDF is a clue.

[ashwagary]

Wait till you realize we never heard from Satoshi again because he died on October 5th, 2011 from pancreatic cancer.

[vonwoodson]

Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens

[pfoof]

The first I saw 184 - I read 1984 - both the old Apple ad and the context of cryptocurrencies matches

[diogenescynic]

I wonder what else is shipped on the OS that we don’t know about.

[hyperific]

What if it's the start of an alternate reality game

[timetraveller26]

I have a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper hidden in my copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

[marcopicentini]

I confirm.

[lawxls]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

[cududa]

How does impact bitcoin in any way at all

[Psychoshy_bc1q]

based and orangepilled

[reactspa]

The answer may be a bit more mundane.

A theory: they needed an existing PDF to test PDF rendering. The Bitcoin paper was (1) handy, and (2) has a diverse variety of content in it, including images and math symbols.

[zakki]

It will be wild if Steve Jobs is Satoshi Nakamoto.

[toomim]

Satoshi's last message was sent on April 26, 2011. Steve Jobs died 6 months later, on Oct 5, 2011. So that all sounds feasible.

(I personally think there's zero chance that they are the same person, but it's fun to entertain this fantasy.)

[ruffrey]

Satoshi last seen: April 26, 2011

Steve Jobs death: October 5, 2011

[anshumankmr]

o_O

[galaxyLogic]

Isn't is a bit like comparing Donald Trump to Jesus Christ? Bitcoin was a genius invention, but did Steve Jobs ever invent anything, except perhaps some great sales pitches?

Steven Jobs marketed himself, Satoshi did not.

Not to say Jobs wasn't a great guy but I know many great guys who never could have invented bitcoin.

[DominoTree]

This is worse than that time they gave everyone a U2 album

[RajT88]

If this shipped in 2013, or earlier, it would really be something.

2019? Nah.

[vonwoodson]

Look, I don’t want to give too much away: but if you’re using literally any of my software and can enter xyzzy… nothing happens

[silentsea90]

"xyzzyspoon!" does work wonders on one piece of software

[Ancapistani]

> One other oddity: there’s a file called cover.jpg in the Resources folder used for testing the Photo media type, a 2,634×3,916 JPEG of a sign taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. There’s no EXIF metadata in the photo, but photographer Thomas Hawk identified it as the location of a nearly identical photo he shot in 2008.

If I were Thomas Hawk, I’d be sending Apple a bill for the use of my photograph.

[jonas21]

I don't think it's his photograph -- they just both photographed the same sign (the Apple version contains parts of the wall that are not in Thomas Hawk's version).

[paxys]

The interesting thing here is that I don't believe the Bitcoin whitepaper was released with any license. If someone could prove themselves to be the author they'd probably be able to make a case for a lot of money from Apple.

[midmagico]

Incorrect; it was released under the MIT licence with the rest of the code, since it is "associated documentation" as it was published alongside the code on the bitcoin.org website upon first release.

Further, Satoshi explicitly reassigned copyright over the entirety of Bitcoin essentially to posterity by rewriting the licensing. That, similarly, includes the bitcoin whitepaper.

[PretzelPirate]

Craig Wright is trying hard to prove that he is Satoshi.

[jaimehrubiks]

This is very likely because of this https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-...?

[eis]

How could it be that versions of MacOS released in 2019 have the paper due to a court case from 2021? Even ignoring the temporal issue I really can't see any plausible connection.

[paulgb]

The dates don’t check out; waxy confirmed it goes back to at least 2019 but that story is from 2021.

[andrewfromx]

This is like a slightly better version of https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/the-campaign-to-erase-th... someone wanted to pick an example PDF and picked the bitcoin one. Just like in the article above back in 1973 they didn't realize the harm in what they were selecting as the sample photo. And maybe there is no harm with this PDF selection? We'll know in 2073!

[kolinko]

What harm was done with that photo? Was even one woman turned away from an industry bc of it? Absurd.

[mdmglr]

184 KB * how many Macs on earth? I don't mean anything by this, just interesting thought experiment.

Was numbers.pdf not enough to accomplish what they wanted?

My opinion: I understand the OS is a big multi-team effort but this just not cool. It's not about the contents of the file or that it's about bitcoin.

Plain and simple: Don't ship files that don't need to be shipped.

All these files, if they are test files, should be in unit/integration test resources.

[reaperman]

Back in my day, "easter eggs" used to be cool.

[colesantiago]

I hope Apple sees this as a bug and removes this in their next major update, hopefully an Apple employee files a radar and gets this removed.

This should have never been allowed on macOS, an endorsement of a pyramid scheme, borderline ponzi scheme, incinerating the planet and evading sanctions.

I use Linux and macOS and the former would never allow this to happen ever.

[mhluongo]

> and the former would never allow this to happen ever.

Not sure what you mean here. There are many Linux distros...?

[plasticsoprano]

How is a hidden file, that was just now stumbled upon 4+ years later, an endorsement?

[chclt]

Why are you getting so worked up about what is fundamentally a neat idea, which may or may not be used well?

> evading sanctions

The horror