Claude Helps Man Recover 5 Bitcoins Forgotten for 11 Years, Worth Nearly $400,000
AI Chatbot Claude Helps Man Recover 5 Bitcoins Forgotten for 11 Years, Worth Nearly $400,000
A user named Cprkrn recovered a Bitcoin wallet containing 5 BTC (~$400,000), locked for over 11 years, with the help of Anthropic's AI, Claude. The wallet was originally locked after Cprkrn changed its password while under the influence in university and subsequently forgot it.
Claude did not crack the password. Instead, after Cprkrn uploaded all files from his old university computer, Claude sifted through the data and located an earlier, pre-password-change version of the encrypted wallet file (wallet.dat). Cprkrn had also recently found a handwritten seed phrase, but it was incompatible with the main wallet file.
Claude's key breakthrough was identifying and fixing a bug in the open-source recovery tool `btcrecover`, which had been concatenating the shared key and user password in the wrong order. After correcting this logic error and running the decryption process, Claude successfully extracted the private key, allowing the funds to be accessed and transferred.
While the post garnered over 10 million views and sparked excitement, wallet recovery experts noted Claude's role was more akin to AI-assisted digital forensics—organizing unstructured historical data, diagnosing tool issues, and executing a corrected process—rather than true cryptographic password cracking. The recovery relied on pre-existing user-held data fragments: old computer files, a valid seed phrase, and an older wallet file.
The story highlights a potential new, lower-cost path for recovering lost crypto assets, dependent on users retaining old data. It also occurs against a backdrop where an estimated one-third of Bitcoin's circulating supply is dormant in long-lost or inaccessible wallets.
marsbit05/14 06:36
