MacBooks to Metaplanet: The corporate bitcoin dominoes are falling
Over 70 public companies already hold bitcoin, including Tesla and Block, though for some major tech stocks, this pivot might be easier than others…
JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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All eyes are on the tariff-addled traditional markets today — most notably, people are watching to see whether bitcoin will show (as it did on Friday) signs that it might perform as a hedge against global uncertainty.
Regardless, analysts continue to maintain prior price projections for bitcoin, with Standard Chartered, VanEck and Galaxy all noting that the fundamentals of the industry remain strong, with corporate and government adoption continuing apace.
Indeed, as we wait for GameStop to buy its first bitcoin, even the (generally) bearish pundits (like Mark Cuban) remain positive on the corporate adoption trend.
At the MIT Bitcoin Conference this weekend, Metaplanet, Semler Scientific and MARA Holdings all maintained they will continue to add BTC to their balance sheets — with most noting that they don’t expect major FAANG companies to be laggards for long…
In that spirit, today we’ll revisit Apple.
In 2023, a file that secreted into macOS revealed a lot about the company’s complicated relationship with Bitcoin. The story behind this easter egg illustrates why Apple will likely be the final domino to fall (if and when BTC treasury adoption goes mainstream).
On This Day: MacOS Bitcoin white paper discovered
“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
That’s the secret to resourceful living, as told by former US President Teddy Roosevelt in his 1913 autobiography.
Someone at Apple clearly took that to heart, more than 110 years later.
Sunday was the two-year anniversary of the (re)discovery that every macOS secretly contained a perfect copy of the Bitcoin white paper.
Technologist Andy Baio found Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper while trying to fix his printer in 2023. It was mysteriously buried inside a built-in image capture app, “Virtual Scanner II,” under the filename “simpledoc.pdf.”
The file was only 184 KB large — the exact size of the original — leading Baio to wonder whether the file was simply “just a convenient, lightweight multipage PDF for testing purposes, never meant to be seen by end users.”
Yeah, right.
There was another file, “cover.jpg” which was used as a testing image for the app. It was taken on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. This, combined with the white paper, suggests the file was an intentional easter egg for the Bitcoin crowd.
The whitepaper could be found in every macOS version, from Mojave (10.14.0) to Ventura (13.3) — but not High Sierra (10.13) or earlier, per Baio’s original post.
That means the Bitcoin white paper was sitting there, waiting to be found, for nearly four years starting in September 2018. And going by rough estimates for how many active macOS devices are currently out in the world, the Bitcoin white paper may have been installed on up to 150 million machines.
Baio was right to point out that he was not actually the first to find the secret white paper. It was previously uncovered by designer Josh D. two and a half years earlier, in November 2020, when they were investigating the utility of the Virtual Scanner II app.
For whatever reason, the internet barely noticed the first time around.
Apple never commented publicly on the easter egg. The tech giant then quietly removed the Bitcoin white paper in the beta for Ventura 13.4, released in May 2023, about a month after Baio’s blog post went viral.
Also, nobody ever came forward to claim responsibility for smuggling the file onto the world’s Macbooks.
But Baio did post a curious update to his blog:
“Update: A little bird tells me that someone internally filed it as an issue nearly a year ago, assigned to the same engineer who put the PDF there in the first place, and that person hasn’t taken action or commented on the issue since. They’ve indicated it will likely be removed in future versions.”
Sure sounds to me that there was a not-so-secret Bitcoin maxi at Apple, at least in 2023. Let’s hope they’re still around.
— David Canellis
Rizzo’s take, the Bitcoin Historian
Believe it or not, there was a time when Bitcoin users smashed and shot up their iPhones.
Back in 2014, Apple, long known for its proprietary software practices, earned the ire of Bitcoin’s earliest adopters by blocking popular wallet apps. Ever since, relations have been more or less the same, with Jack Dorsey publicly shaming Apple CEO Tim Cook in 2023 for his company’s total ignorance of Bitcoin.
Fast forward to 2025 and not much has changed. Apple remains opposed to cryptocurrency, which is one of the reasons the whitepaper easter egg has always felt like the work of an activist, not proof that Apple has any grand crypto scheme up its sleeve.
Still, the incident underscores why the California tech giant must eventually change its stance. As bitcoin continues to become the money of individuals, corporations, and nations, Apple will have to adjust its plans.
Put in Bitcoin parlance: It’s a matter of when, not if.
— Rizzo
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