Bitcoin: Apple hid manifest on Mac since 2018.

Bitcoin: Apple hid manifest on Mac since 2018.

A technology expert has claimed to have found the manifest for the bitcoin hidden in your Mac and consider that all of these computers have had them since a 2018 update.

Andy Baio believes that Apple added the ‘whitepaper’, the name by which the currency roadmap is known, the document that kicked off the bitcoin and who drove this cryptographic current more than a decade ago.

This is how he found it

“While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of the technical document from Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto,” Baio refers in a blog post.

“It was apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018,” he adds.

He said he asked more than a dozen of his friends and fellow users of Mac to confirm, and the document was there for each of them: a file called “simpledoc.pdf”.

If you have a Mac, you can open the terminate and type the following command to find it: open /System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf.

For those using macOS 10.14 or later, the document should immediately open in ‘Preview’ as a PDF file, he explained.

What is the bitcoin manifest?

The now famous ‘whitepaper’, entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, was published in October 2008 by the hitherto anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. In it, the author lays out his thesis on the underlying mechanisms driving what is now the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market value.

“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution,” the abstract reads.

Baio could not understand why, of all the documents, the original manifesto was chosen from bitcoin to include it in Apple’s operating system.

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Daniel Chapman