The legend of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, lives on: in an Apple computer near you.
Andy Baio, the former CTO of Kickstarter, posted Wednesday on his more-than-two-decades-old blog that he found the Bitcoin white paperthe nine-page document that outlines the design of the worlds first cryptocurrencysquirreled away on his MacBook.
Ive asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them, he wrote. All versions of Macs operating systems created after 2018 had the white paper preloaded, he said.
Baio landed upon the PDF when he was trying to scan documents from a combination printer-scanner onto his computer, he told Fortune. He found the white paper, authored by Nakamoto, after trying to connect the scanner to his MacBook, which wasnt initially appearing on his laptop. On a recently released MacBook, Fortune was able to independently access the PDF in the same location.
The discovery is but the latest in popular culture. Beyond die-hard BitcoinersNakamotos text is seen by some as a quasi-religious screedthe white paper has shown up on Formula 1 cars and is sold as wallpaper. The author remains an almost mythological figure, whose mysterious origins and unknown identity have spawned reams of speculative journalism. (Even Elon Musk, the embattled CEO of Twitter and Tesla, has guessed at his identity.)
Baio said he believes the inclusion of the white paper in the tech giants software wasnt an explicit decision by the company.
In its early history, Apple developers used to hide Easter eggs in the operating system, he told Fortune. But I get the impression this wasnt something that management would have approved ofbasically the decision of a single engineer.
He said an anonymous source told him that someone at Apple flagged the white papers inclusion in its operating systems internally, but the task of removing it was assigned to the very same engineer who had initially placed it.
With this new attention to it, Baio added, Ill be surprised if it isnt removed in the next beta.
A spokesperson for Apple didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.
