During college, he got high and changed his password, losing 5 BTC. 11 years later, Claude helped him recover the funds by decrypting his old computer.
According to Dynamic Observing Beating monitoring, user @cprkrn claimed to have recovered 5 BTC locked for 11 years using Anthropic's Claude, worth about $400,000 at the current price. The post's views surpassed 10 million within 12 hours.
Back in 2014, @cprkrn bought 5 BTC during college, then forgot the wallet password after a night of revelry. He had an old seed phrase in hand but couldn't match it to the modified wallet file. Over the years, he tried brute-forcing with btcrecover and Hashcat, as well as paid for commercial recovery services at $250 per attempt, all in vain.
At wit's end, he bundled all files from his old university computer and fed them to Claude. Claude did three things: found an old version of the wallet.dat file before the password change in a haystack of documents; discovered that btcrecover had mistakenly concatenated the sharedKey and password in the wrong order during decryption, an unnoticed bug until then; corrected the logic, ran it once, extracted the private key, converted it to Wallet Import Format (WIF) for wallet importation. On-chain records showed the 5 BTC were completely withdrawn that day.
Claude did not brute-force the encryption or tamper with Bitcoin's cryptography. Its actions were more akin to digital archaeology: finding the right wallet version in old files, comprehending the recovery tool's source code, and fixing a bug. The prerequisite was that the user possessed the old seed phrase and old computer files; in cases where the private key was irretrievably lost, AI had no solution.
After the post circulated in the crypto community, notable figures such as Nic Carter, Laura Shin, Jesse Pollak, among others, reposted. However, many on Reddit poured cold water on it, suggesting that @cprkrn's original post claiming "Claude cracked this thing" was exaggeration, as Claude essentially helped him sift through files and make a few code changes.
