Eleven years ago, an X user who goes by cprkrn changed the password on a Bitcoin wallet holding 5 BTC. He was stoned at the time. He forgot the new password by morning, and 5 BTC sat untouched while it grew to roughly $400,000.
He had tried btcrecover, an open-source brute-force tool, more than once over the years and given up. Last week, he dumped his entire old college-era hard drive into Claude and asked the AI to figure out what was wrong. According to Tom's Hardware's write-up of the recovery, Claude found a December 2019 wallet backup that predated the drunken password change, then spotted a bug in how btcrecover combined the shared key with candidate passwords. Once that was patched, the tool chewed through 3.5 trillion guesses and decrypted the private keys.
cprkrn announced the win on X. "HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMG CLAUDE JUST CRACKED THIS SHIT, THANK YOU @AnthropicAI."
Claude didn't actually crack anything. It read a decade of forgotten files, noticed a backup the owner had forgotten about, and fixed a config bug. The AI got the brute force pointed in the right direction.
Other people have not been so lucky. James Howells is still in court trying to dig up a Welsh landfill where his hard drive containing 8,000 BTC was dumped with the trash in 2013. A Canadian crypto exchange CEO died in 2018 and took the keys to roughly $200 million of customer funds with him.
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