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The Bitcoin white paper is in macOS, but Apple’s founder didn’t put it there
If readers have a Mac or MacBook with macOS 10.14 (or later), they can find their PDF copy of the Bitcoin white paper by opening the Terminal app and entering the following command line: open/System/Library/Capture Image/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/ Resources/simpledoc.pdf
There’s not much more to say about the newspaper’s inclusion in MacOS, since apart from someone else who independently discovered its presence on Mac in 2021, nothing is known about why it was put there.
The obvious answer is that the document ‘was used in tests’ by a developer and ‘they forgot to remove it’. Yet it seems that even Apple as an organization might not know why it’s in macOS, since Andy Baio updated his blog with a note that an internal source told him that “someone stored it internally as an issue almost a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t acted or commented on the
issue since.”
Steve Jobs and Satoshi Nakamoto: conspiracy theories begin
If this internal source is to be trusted, the person who hid the Bitcoin whitepaper in macOS is still working at Apple, which obviously means it can’t be Steve Jobs (who passed away in 2011).
However, this hasn’t stopped many people from indulging in the speculation that Jobs was Satoshi Nakamoto. Some have raised this possibility simply as an interesting theory, while others have come out of the closet and have seriously stated that they believe that the co-founder of Apple
was Nakamoto.
It seems that, apart from the fact that both are pioneers of technology, the only (circumstantial) evidence to support this theory is a coincidence. Namely, Jobs died in October 2011, while Nakamoto published his last message in December 2010. In other words, Nakamoto’s disappearance is somewhat adapted to Jobs’ sick health and possible death, at least according to some
people..
Steve Jobs wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto
Of course, a vague coincidence is barely enough to lend credibility to any Steve-Jobs-is-Satoshi-Nakamoto theory. And it’s certainly not enough to counter what’s publicly known about both Jobs
and Nakamoto.
First of all, several people have (rightly) pointed out that Jobs didn’t really know how to program and was more of a presentation/marketing/vision man at Apple, while people like (Apple co-founder colleague) Steve Wozniak actually built things. This already makes Jobs’ candidacy unlikely, but the theory is contradicted by other known facts about Nakamoto
.
In particular, Nakamoto regularly used British English in his writings and posts, mixing spellings and phrases in British English with instances of American English. There is no record of Jobs spending much time in the United Kingdom, particularly during his youth and education (periods that would have shaped his spelling habits). As such, it seems unlikely that it would have taken the use of British English spelling
.
Perhaps more overwhelmingly, a 2020 analysis of the time of Nakamoto’s various posts concluded that the creator of Bitcoin was most likely residing in London while working on the launch and initial development of the cryptocurrency. According to the authors of the analysis, the available timestamps are more consistent with a UK time zone, while they also remind us that Nakamoto included a Times headline in the
first Bitcoin block.
It’s worth pointing out that this study didn’t conclusively prove that Nakamoto resided in a UK time zone. However, it weakens the theory that the creator of Bitcoin was Jobs (who lived in California), providing supporters of this theory with something embarrassing that they would need to explain
.
There are other inconsistencies and contradictions, including the fact that Nakamoto put his birthday as April 5, 1978 on his P2P Foundation profile, when Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 (obviously, anyone can easily lie about their date of birth online). More importantly, there’s no known record of Jobs ever publicly showing interest in digital money, as can be seen with other more likely candidates like Nick Szabo and
Adam Back.
Advertising is good for Bitcoin
Taken together, these facts and arguments make it highly unlikely that Steve Jobs was Satoshi Nakamoto.
The vast majority of people within the cryptocurrency community are likely to be well aware of it, but that hasn’t stopped many of them from mentioning the theory. This is not surprising, since Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have long been nourished by the publicity and exposure that comes from being associated (however spuriously) with higher-profile mainstream figures and companies (such as Elon Musk and Tesla). The Steve-Jobs-is-Satoshi-Nakamoto theory is another example of this, with the spread of the theory through social media helping to make Bitcoin mentioned once again in the mainstream media. (for example Business Insider, Forbes
).
In other words, the veracity of the theory is largely irrelevant to its primary objective of keeping Bitcoin in the public eye. And in this he succeeded, even though we are not yet close to solving the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity
.
