It seems that the user already had some candidate passwords and multiple wallets stored on their PC. They'd been trying to brute-force their way into the locked file with btcrecover, an open-source Bitcoin wallet recovery tool, but to no success. Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook. The HD addresses recovered by the seed phrase matched those of a specific file on their computer, confirming that it was the wallet that held the 5 BTC, but it remained encrypted.
Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data. Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren’t combined properly. With the bug ironed out and an older wallet predating the password change, Claude successfully ran btcrecover and was able to decrypt the private keys, allowing cprkrn to transfer the five “lost” BTC to their current wallet.
This is a happy ending for one user who forgot their wallet password, giving them a massive windfall because of Bitcoin’s massive increase in value during the past few years. And while Anthropic’s Claude did not magically guess the right set of characters to unlock the file that held the private keys, it fixed one critical issue that cprkrn missed out on, allowing him to finally regain his crypto. Before AI LLMs became popular, researchers spent at least half a year cracking open a Bitcoin wallet with a forgotten 20-character password. It was well worth the effort, though, as it contained an estimated $1.6 million in BTC back in 2024. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same thing for this poor guy who lost $780 million in Bitcoin after a 2025 court ruling prevented him from attempting to rummage through the local dump after his laptop with 8,000 BTC was discarded in the trash.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-trader-recovers-usd400-000-using-claude-ai-after-losing-wallet-password-11-years-ago-bot-tried-3-5-trillion-passwords-before-decrypting-an-old-wallet-backup#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/subscription
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