Apple may have fallen out of love with Bitcoin.
In April, an unusual bit of news made the rounds: Someone had hidden a copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper in Apple’s macOS, and it remained there for years and through multiple major versions of the OS.
It probably ends now, however. According to 9to5Mac, the latest beta version of macOS Ventura doesn’t contain the file anymore.
The file, which was hidden inside a tool called “VirtualScanner.app” is nowhere to be found, and the entire VirtualScanner.app itself was removed, too. Besides the copy of the Bitcoin whitepaper, the file also contained a mysterious image, likely taken on Treasure Island in San Francisco, along with a few other files.
Credit: Satoshi Nakamoto/Apple
The Bitcoin whitepaper was originally published by Bitcoin’s mysterious founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, in 2008. It contains a technical overview of the Bitcoin protocol.
We may never find out why the Bitcoin whitepaper was hidden inside macOS in the first place. Given that it was fairly quickly expunged from the OS, it’s likely that an Apple engineer thought it would be a cool idea, but Apple decided they don’t want to be associated with Bitcoin in this way.
