Author: Claude, Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Introduction: An X platform user imported all old college computer files into Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude and successfully recovered a Bitcoin wallet that had been locked for over 11 years, containing 5 BTC, worth approximately $400,000 at current prices. Claude did not brute-force the password. Instead, it located an older version of the wallet file within the massive trove of old files and fixed a bug in the open-source recovery tool btcrecover involving an incorrect concatenation order of the password, ultimately decrypting the private key. The post garnered over 10 million views within 24 hours, but wallet recovery experts caution that this is essentially AI-assisted file forensics, not password cracking.
An X platform user using the pseudonym Cprkrn posted on May 13th, stating that Anthropic's AI model Claude helped him recover a Bitcoin wallet that had been locked for over 11 years, containing 5 BTC, worth approximately $398,000 at the day's price of around $79,600 per coin.
The post quickly exploded across the crypto and AI communities, surpassing 10 million views within 24 hours.
College-Era Hallucinogenic Drug Use Led to Password Change, Locking Wallet for 11 Years
According to Cprkrn's post on X, he purchased Bitcoins during his college years at around $250 per coin. Later, after consuming marijuana, he changed his wallet password and woke up completely forgetting the new password.
The original password was quite personal in style... as disclosed by him, it was "lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)".
The wallet address is 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6, of the P2PKH format (an early, commonly used traditional Bitcoin address type). According to bitcoin.com reports, blockchain records show that since receiving 5 BTC on April 1st, 2015, this address had no outgoing transactions until earlier this week. Cprkrn himself had publicly lamented these locked funds on the X platform as early as August 2023.
Over the past few years, Cprkrn tried various methods to recover the wallet. He spent about $250 on commercial recovery services, all of which failed; he claimed to have also tried about "7 trillion" password combinations, using common recovery tools like btcrecover and Hashcat, all to no avail. He waited until the Bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 before deciding to initiate a serious new attempt.
Claude Locates Old Wallet File, Fixes Recovery Tool Bug to Complete Decryption
According to bitcoin.com, the breakthrough occurred after Cprkrn imported all files from his old college computer into Claude. Claude located an earlier version of the encrypted wallet file (wallet.dat) within the massive dataset, with a timestamp preceding that fateful password change.
Meanwhile, Cprkrn had found a handwritten seed phrase a few weeks earlier by chance. However, this seed phrase could not unlock the current wallet file. Claude's key contribution was discovering the technical root cause: the open-source recovery tool btcrecover had the concatenation order of the shared key and the user password reversed during the decryption process. Claude corrected this logical error, reran the decryption process, and successfully extracted the private key in WIF format.
Cprkrn shared a screenshot of Claude's output interface on the X platform. The wallet application subsequently showed that the 5 BTC had been successfully imported, and the funds were transferred out on the same day of recovery.
Expert Debate: AI-Assisted Forensics, Not Password Cracking
The discussion sparked by this post was not all praise; it was also accompanied by debate over Claude's actual role.
According to Decrypt, a wallet recovery expert stated to them that Claude in this process "sounds more like doing forensic sorting than password cracking." Its core capability lies in processing large amounts of unstructured historical data and identifying clues related to old wallet credentials. Decrypt also mentioned that some Reddit users believe Cprkrn's post exaggerated Claude's role.
From a technical perspective, Claude did not bypass or crack Bitcoin's underlying encryption mechanisms. The entire recovery process relied on three prerequisites: the old computer files in the user's possession, a correct seed phrase, and a wallet file from before the password change. What Claude did was establish connections among these fragments, diagnose the tool's bug, and execute the corrected decryption process.
According to bitcoin.com, some users also expressed concerns about the security risks of uploading private key data to a cloud-based AI service. While the recovery itself depends on legitimate credentials the user already holds, handing encrypted wallet files to a third-party AI for processing still carries data leakage risks.
One-Third of Bitcoin Lies Dormant in Forgotten Wallets
The backdrop to this event is that a significant amount of Bitcoin remains locked in wallets from early users who have forgotten or lost their keys. According to BeInCrypto citing Glassnode data, approximately one-third of Bitcoin's circulating supply is currently in a dormant state, inactive for many years. Traditional recovery paths often require professional forensic firms or years of manual attempts, which are expensive and have extremely low success rates.
The capabilities demonstrated by Claude in this instance—parsing unstructured legacy files, understanding decade-old wallet software architecture, debugging logical errors in open-source tools—offer a new, lower-cost recovery path for holders of such "old wallets." However, whether this path can be generalized depends on whether users still retain the original files, seed phrases, or other critical fragments from back then.
Cprkrn stated at the end of his post that he plans to name his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Considering he just gained an extra ~$400,000 out of thin air, this might not be too crazy an idea (laughs).
