Emotions have been running high in the world of crypto investing since the onset of the latest crypto winter. It seems like the only things we’ve been talking about over the past year are the plummeting crypto prices and all the negative implications this has had on the industry. However, crypto winters, as dreadful as they might be, cannot be predicted or avoided, so as we’re waiting for this bear run to transition into a bullish trend, we might as well step away from the relentless monitoring of trends and resist the compulsion to constantly check the value of Bitcoin or keep an eye on its competitors.
Fortunately, the cryptoverse provides an infinite source of interesting developments and events, beyond the charts, investors’ sentiment, trading volumes, and other statistical information that analysts are so eager to compile and dissect to the point of obsession.
So, in other crypto news, Bitcoin’s alleged inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto, just turned 48 on April 5th, or at least that’s what a large part of the crypto community believes, and this year’s celebrations brought on a new series of controversies and debates. That’s a bit curious to say the least, considering that Satoshi Nakamoto is nothing but a pseudonym and the creators’ real identity has never been revealed – and will most likely remain shrouded in mystery forever. But we’re going to explain what’s behind this intriguing celebration and the events that came with it.
Happy birthday, Satoshi!
For Bitcoin supporters and crypto fans at large, January 3rd marks a special date. It’s the day when Bitcoin was officially launched and the first stepping stone for the development of the crypto industry was laid down. However, there’s another date that bears great significance for crypto enthusiasts – April 5th, the birthday of Bitcoin’s elusive founding father. There wouldn’t be anything strange about celebrating the birthday of the person who initiated the crypto phenomenon a little over 14 years ago if it weren’t for the fact that no one knows their real identity or anything else about them for that matter.
What we do know is that whoever might be hiding behind this fictitious name entered a birthdate when they registered for the pseudonym with The P2P Foundation. That’s how April 5th became known and celebrated as Satoshi Nakamoto’s birthday. So, every year, on this particular day, the debate over Satoshi’s real identity reignites, adding new theories to the story but never being able to provide any answers.
Bitcoin’s connection to Apple
This year, Satoshi’s presumed birthday was particularly interesting because of a very strange event that recently resurfaced, linking Bitcoin’s creator with the tech giant Apple. It was brought to Mac users’ attention that Bitcoin’s white paper – the document that outlines Satoshi’s intentions and framework for launching the crypto project that they titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System – has been included in every Mac operating system since 2018.
The first time that news broke out about this peculiar association between Bitcoin and Apple was back in 2020 when Twitter user Joshua Dickens, who used to work for Apple as a product designer, found the nine-page PDF hiding in plain sight in an inconspicuous folder in his Mac computer, along with an image of a bay in San Francisco, and tweeted about it. Then in April 2021, another user named bernd178 revealed on the MacOS Community Forum that they’d found the same file on their computer and started a thread on the topic. However, none of these discoveries garnered much attention and were eventually forgotten, probably because they were regarded as isolated cases that could be easily brushed off as a mere coincidence or something that people were trying to read too much into.
That is until blogger Andy Baio brought this topic back into the limelight by writing about it on his blog Waxy, and he chose to do that on April 5th to make sure that this time the story gets the attention it deserves. Baio elucidated that he came across the file named simpledoc.pdf while trying to fix his printer, and also explained that Mac users can access it by introducing a simple command into the terminal app: open /System/Library/Image\ Capture/Devices/VirtualScanner.app/Contents/Resources/simpledoc.pdf. The blogger went on to clarify that he also consulted with other Mac users and they all confirmed they have the same file stored on their computers, so it’s doubtful this was just an isolated event or something that could be interpreted as an honest mistake.
Obviously, this little piece of information was more than enough to incite people’s curiosity and imagination, giving rise to all sorts of speculations and wild conspiracy theories. As you may assume, most of these speculations surrounded Nakamoto’s real identity, and there were more than just a few voices connecting Bitcoin’s inventor and Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.
The main argument supporting this theory is that Nakamoto ceased all public activity around the same time Steve Jobs died, so the timeline fits. However, the white paper was added to Mac systems in 2017, seven years after Jobs passed away, so unless it was a wish that was carried out posthumously by someone else it would have been impossible for Jobs to be behind it, and the whole scenario seems a bit outlandish.
At The End
The fact remains that Bitcoin’s white paper lurking on so many Mac computers for so many years is rather strange. Unfortunately, it doesn’t bring much clarification as to who Satoshi Nakamoto might be. If anything, it only adds to the confusion and mystery surrounding his work and legacy.
But in the end, it doesn’t really matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is or what they intended to achieve by launching Bitcoin because over the years the project took a life of its own and is now a larger-than-life phenomenon that at the same time belongs to all and to no one. So, the only things we’d gain by uncovering the founder’s identity would be a nice story and nothing more.
