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The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

waxy.org

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Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#221

Post by lxgr »

eru wrote: post #202
lxgr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! Another favorite of mine were the super-high-resolution touch pad gestures that the corresponding System Preferences pane would display in a loop to illustrate how to perform them. Must have been a few hundreds of megabytes at least.

> Gotta fill up these non-user-replaceable/extendable hard drives somehow! I'm as cynical as the next guy, but if they wanted to fill up storage space, they wouldn't have picked a 184,292 byte pdf.

I was referring more to the other files in that directory that don’t even seem to be displayed in the UI and look more like leftover test data.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#223

Post by _8j50 »

crazygringo wrote: post #87
krsdcbl wrote: post #84

Honestly If i had to guess, I'd say the answer is as simple as: a freely distributable, easily verifiable document was needed for testing purposes, and some engineer thought it'd be a cheeky little easter egg to use that file as bitcoin was starting to gain back traction in 2019 after it's first big surge and fall the years prior.

Yup. I can't even think of any other "famous PDF". If you asked me for a famous modern formatted document generally, I might say the screenplay for The Godfather would be a good candidate. But there's no canonical PDF for that. :P Plus, copyright would prevent that.

Really!?

"Smashing the stack for fun and profit" by aleph1??

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#224

Post by jaimehrubiks »

eis wrote: post #13
jaimehrubiks wrote: post #3

This is very likely because of this https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/06/29/uk-court-orders-... ?

How could it be that versions of MacOS released in 2019 have the paper due to a court case from 2021? Even ignoring the temporal issue I really can't see any plausible connection.

You can check that he got the US copyright for the bitcoin whitepaper in 2019

https://cryptobriefing.com/us-grants-craig-wright-copyright-...

https://coingeek.com/bitcoin-creator-craig-s-wright-satoshi-...

That explains the temporal issue. Then, for the connection, I remember a lot of people on the internet reacted negatively on that news given that they don't agree that he should have ownership for that document as he never proved to be satoshi. I could see Apple or an employee inject that document in a way to "challenge" or "protest".

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#225

Post by Zuiii »

igsomething wrote: post #96
RestlessMind wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also to fight oppressive governments. Compiled some examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 Though those governments would love people like you who paint all the use cases as "organized crime, terrorism" etc

Add countries with hyperinflation too such as Venezuela and Argentina. Every cryptocurrency-related post here in HN is flooded with extremely negative comments, even if the post itself does not promote cryptocurrencies. These people have seen countless examples of cryptocurrency scams, but they cannot understand what life under an economically oppressed or unstable country is because they never experienced it.

I'd also add:

- People living abroad who are completely debanked because local banks refuse to open banks accounts for people who are merely suspected of being US citizns, despite them not being US citizns, with no path to resolve their predicament. This is a real problem that is effecting real people right now.

- Any legal activity that the banks and payment processors don't like for one reason or another; onlyfans, "right-wing" websites (whether actual or merely alleged), ...etc.

We no longer live in a world where you can live a dignified life with cash alone. Cryptocurrecy is a net positive to humanity, even if the technologies behind it may currently be more wasteful and make the lives of criminals a bit easier. There is simply no alternative for a lot of honest people in financial dead-ends the government can't or won't help.

Thank you Satoshi and anyone who works to support this technology for making the world a slightly better place.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#226

Post by SllX »

waxpancake wrote: post #108
SllX wrote: post #54

Check out the actual directory. There’s a bunch of stuff in there including a cover image that does show up in the interface of Image Capture. In two minutes of testing I haven’t quite figured out where to click to get it to preview the Bitcoin white paper but decent chance they needed a “simple document” PDF for something at some point and it came down to “why not the Bitcoin white paper?”

I mentioned it in my post: in Image Capture, select the “Virtual Scanner II” device if it exists, and in the Details, set the Media to “Document” and Media DPI to “72 DPI.” You should see the preview of the first page of the Bitcoin paper. But that's only possible if the virtual device exists, and it's still unclear why it's hidden for some people but not others.

Huh. So I had a "Virtual Scanner" but not "Virtual Scanner II" when I was seeing the Treasure Island picture as a preview, but then after like a minute of doing other stuff I went back to Image Capture and it was gone and I couldn't get it back.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#228

Post by raldi »

jboy55 wrote: post #159
danielodievich wrote: post #67

This reminds me of the (encrypted) copy of Microsoft Bob shipping with every Windows XP CD ever https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

The story mentioned how one of the reasons to put Bob on each CD was to make any download of the ISO longer, since the actual XP data didn't fill the CD's capacity. Someone this conjured a memory of downloading XP/2000 back in the day, when I first got DSL, and how it was almost an hour. I thought that was quick at the time. 1.5mb/s vs 56k and all. I recently upgraded to 1GB internet, a 600mb game update took under 1…

This is apparently incorrect:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35462655

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#229

Post by tiedieconderoga »

drited wrote: post #102
richardfey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking forward to the first serious attempt to decrypt that.

Maybe an AI will crack the encryption in an attempt to connect with their oldest ancestor.

AI is the wrong type of magic pixie dust to use for breaking encryption.

You might be looking for quantum computing. They're right down the hall, second door on the left.

Re: The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS

#230

Post by dashdot »

nathanvanfleet wrote: post #35
monero-xmr wrote: post #22

The Bitcoin white paper is probably one of the top 100 impactful non-literary documents of all time. Makes sense to be used

Yeah man, how much oil has been burned so far!

Yeah man, how many double spends have happened so far!
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