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Claude Helps Recover Locked $400K Bitcoin Wallet After 11 Years (tomshardware.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the stoned-cold-storage dept.
A Bitcoin holder reportedly recovered 5 BTC worth nearly $400,000 with the help of Anthropic's Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they changed their wallet password while "stoned" and forgot it, unable to regain access for more than 11 years. Tom's Hardware reports: After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point.

[...] 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.
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Claude Helps Recover Locked $400K Bitcoin Wallet After 11 Years More

Claude Helps Recover Locked $400K Bitcoin Wallet After 11 Years

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  • > dumped their whole college computer into Claude

    Ouch. Lucky.

    • but can Claude dig up the dump to recover bitcoins?

      • Re:doxxed self for cash (Score:4, Funny)

        by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @11:02PM (#66144155) Homepage

        but can Claude dig up the dump to recover bitcoins?

        Nope. But digging through a massive pile of rubbish in search of money seems like a rather apt metaphor for the job market after AI gets through with it.

        • I can totally see hordes of people climbing into the dump where that one guy's harddrive ended up.
          I could even see people forming cooperative groups and dividing the area up into zones or something to find that drive.

          And, stuff like this happening is why you keep multiple copies of something like this... cloud, local, USB thumbdrive, maybe even a copy on your cellphone... it's really highly doubtful that you'll lose all four things at once (and have a couple printouts of the mnemonic stashed someplace secur

    • Surely it would have been a copy. Surely....?
    • What is with the woke "they" and "their"? Didnâ(TM)t get the memo that woke is dead?

  • The moral of the story is... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Wolfrider ( 856 ) <[kingneutron] [at] [gmail.com]> on Thursday May 14, 2026 @04:31PM (#66143771) Homepage Journal

    a) Don't be a dumbass

    b) Keep multiple copies of your password and critical files

    c) SEE A

    • Three digit UID? Wow, hope you bought some bitcoins back then :)
      • I went through every backup and drive I had and found my old wallet from around 2010-11. Then realized I had ran the wallet but did not select the option to mine.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Most people struggle with a). The Internet just makes that more obvious.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The internet ? I think the elected US government makes that several orders of magnitude more obvious.

    • Set the password while stoned, a garbage dump of files and data, random old copies in forgotten backups, is he auditioning to be a corporate IT admin?

    • The moral of the story is that it is easier and easier for police and intelligence services to quickly get meaningful information out of hard disks, including passwords and files in a personal workflow / storage structure (or lack of structure). LLMs might piece this together and be targeted. Security analysts would be faster and ignore noise better, but what is shown here might scale to millions of citizens.

  • Anonymous Twitter Stories (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @04:32PM (#66143773)

    It's not that it isn't true and it's nice he used Claude to do it . . . but . . . best I can tell this is just a total non-story.

    All he really did, was find a backup of a file with the passphrase he knew. Then despite knowing the passphrase, he couldn't get it to open with some software he tried. And it looks like Claude didn't "find a bug" in that software, it just showed him how to use it. He was entering the passphrase in the wrong format. And like users will do with all software for all time, he called that a bug, and someone else repeated it.

    It is good he used Claude to do this but it . . . didn't really do anything. I mean the article compares it to researchers spending months cracking a key. It's not even sort of the same thing.

    • Claude also discovered an issue where the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren't combined properly

      Sounds like a bug to me.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But LLMs must be hyped so that some assholes can get even richer, hence story. Obviously, this is a) an irrelevant even b) just "better search" and c) this person did not get competent help to do things before.

    • Thank you. That is how I read it also.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwid ( 4893241 )

      the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort

      That's what AI is good at, and what the user couldn't do themselves. Find the right signal buried in a massive pile of noise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      While you could do all this manually, AI combines some tools in ways that makes it a hell of a lot easier.

      Notebooks are a good example. You can OCR them, you can type stuff in manually, you can extract all the text and throw it into a password cracker. It's laborious though. Now you can just take a photo of every page on your phone, throw that and your personal files from around that time, and have the AI do it. Maybe throw in some ebooks you facebooked, which you read around that time, in case you used a p

  • ... down his student debt.

  • Great (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @04:42PM (#66143789)

    Now if it could help me find the flash drive with $125 in 2012 bitcoin that sat on my truck's dashboard for a couple years before I lost it, that'd be great.

    • If you can find the truck (if you don't have it), tear apart the defrost channels in the dashboard... 95% sure it's in there, along with those sunglasses you can't find.

  • A tool to search in files (Score:4, Funny)

    by sTERNKERN ( 1290626 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @05:01PM (#66143819)
    Wow... WOW... Science has truly come far.

  • Now, where exactly did I *leave* that wallet? It's got to be somewhere around here! If I were stoned, what would I have done with it? Well, I mean, first I would have had to get stoned for that to happen. But let's not ruin the plot. Maybe Claude can help me figure all this out. Or maybe it can help me identify a long-lost relative who actually *did* get stoned and *did* leave a Bitcoin wallet somewhere lying around. The possibilities are endless!

  • Wonder how the IRS treats something like this. They were worthless files on a backup disk for all these years until Claude unlocked them and now they are worth something. So while he always had them, no reasonable person would ever claim you should have to file a 709 form over them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      Gemini tells me that as long as the guy doesn't spend any of the bitcoins since this was a transfer only at this time, there's nothing to report to the IRS. He didn't buy any bitcoins or sell any bitcoins. wallet transfers are not counted by the IRS as a transaction. No past taxes or back reporting is necessary. When he does finally sell these bitcoins, he'll have to pay capital gains on 100% of their current value since his starting value ("purchase" if you will) was zero presumably. He'll want to ma

    • It's like those guys who find a Civil War chest with a hundred gold coins in it and call the FBI.

      Clout is far too expensive.

    • They're basically considered an investment asset until you either use them to purchase something or convert to cash. Having unlocked a previously locked wallet with a forgotten key doesn't change their status in anyway that has anything to do with the IRS.

  • So he waited until he could delegate the task to an LLM, instead of doing ANY work on his own from the look of things.

    That's an amazing degree of laziness.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      From TFS:

      they changed their wallet password while "stoned" and forgot it

      That's an affirmative on the laziness.

  • so basically guy had backup this whole time, and was searching on the wrong place to begin with then finding old PC and already desperate handed over to Claude, which just found the old backup misleading sensationalism article bait headline

  • Next step is it will allow anyone on the Intertubes to find all of my passwords.

  • Ahh well, good for this guy at least. I wonder if he'll actually name his kid Claude as he said in his post.

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