Apple will remove the bitcoin white paper from its computers in the next update to macOS, report says

A man walks past a backlit Apple logo during an Apple media event in San Francisco, California, September 9, 2015

REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach

Apple will likely remove the bitcoin white paper from its computer system, reports say.
A work ticket to remove the paper had already been submitted, a source at Apple told Andy Baio, who discovered the paper.
The beta version of macOS Ventura 13.4 does not have the digital token's manifesto, per AppleInsider.

Apple will probably remove the hidden bitcoin white paper from its computers in the next update to macOS, reports say.

According to a report from AppleInsider, the digital token's manifesto penned by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto has been removed in the beta version of macOS Ventura 13.4, less than a month after it was accidentally discovered by tech blogger Andy Baio in early April.

Baio told Decrypt that the white paper would likely be removed in future software updates, citing a source within Apple. The source said a developer work ticket had been submitted to remove the paper, and was assigned to the same person who put the white paper in the software system.

The paper, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," is widely regarded as bitcoin's founding document, laying out the working mechanisms that enable the digital token to act as a currency.

Baio helped the white paper go viral earlier this month after he accidentally discovered the PDF, which appeared to have been shipped with every Apple computer since 2018.

"Of all the documents in the world, why was the Bitcoin whitepaper chosen? Is there a secret Bitcoin maxi working at Apple?" Baio said in a blog post at the time. "Maybe it was just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDf for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users."

The paper's discovery led to theories that Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs could have been Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin that withdrew their presence from the internet in late 2010, around the same time Jobs passed away. But there's no way Jobs himself placed the paper in the system, observers say, as the Apple co-founder died in 2011, seven years before the paper first appeared on Apple computers.

Bitcoin rose to $29,772 on Wednesday. Despite tanking in 2022 amid rising interest rates, the cryptocurrency has rebounded nearly 80% since the start of the year.

Curious Mac users can enter the following prompt into the terminal program to load the PDF of the white paper: