Odd file on your Mac

The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in Every Modern Copy of macOS

“While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.”

Also included is this photo from Flickr power user, Thomas Hawk
Imgur

Yes, it is there in Monterey. From the rest of the contents of the folder, it looks like it was just put there as a random sample file.

But, bless 'em, there’s no deleting that (or gigabytes of other wasted space…

There’s an interesting comment on the Ars Technica article on this discovery, pointing out that the Bitcoin whitepaper is actually a pretty good “test document” for an OCR tool (which is relevant, as the Bitcoin PDF document is found in the VirtualScanner app). It contains combination of plain text, equations with math symbols, Greek characters, code examples, etc.

The commentator said that this would make it a “good obstacle course demo for a virtual scanner and OCR tool”.

2 Likes

Good point.