The world’s largest tech company has quietly removed the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper from the latest beta version of its operating system upgrade.
According to 9to5Mac, the test scanner app, Virtual Scanner II, was removed from the latest MacOS Ventura 13.4 beta version, resulting in the removal of the Bitcoin whitepaper.
The PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper was found in the Virtual Scanner II folder in macOS, which has been shipped with every copy of MacOS for the past five years. It was suspected to be a joke among Apple engineers, but nobody knew why it was there. Conspiracy theories also emerged about Steve Jobs being Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, Apple has now removed the document, which was in a folder within the Image Capture app alongside other seemingly random files such as PDFs and images. 9to5Mac commented that this confirmed their theory that the Bitcoin white paper and the internal tool were never meant to be found by regular users.
Meanwhile, in a related development, a California court ruled that the tech giant violated state competition laws by preventing developers from using alternative in-app payment methods. The company tried to force NFT creators and developers to use its own payments platform, where a 30% commission was charged.
