How One Man Used Claude AI to Crack Open a Bitcoin Wallet Locked for 11 Years

 


A Bitcoin wallet that had been locked since roughly 2014 is back in its owner's hands. No professional recovery firm. No seed phrase backup. Just an AI, an old laptop, and a mnemonic that turned out to be the right key all along.

X user @cprkrn made headlines on May 13 after posting that Anthropic's Claude AI had helped him recover access to a Bitcoin wallet he had been locked out of for over 11 years. He had changed his wallet password in college, forgotten the new one, and spent years and thousands of dollars in failed recovery attempts before turning to AI.

The process, as he described it on X, involved dumping the entire contents of his old college computer into Claude. The AI found an old wallet.dat file buried in the data. A mnemonic he had located weeks earlier successfully decrypted it. From there, Claude ran btcrecover commands, identified a sharedKey concatenation issue in the decryption algorithm, and extracted the private keys.

The wallet address on Blockchain.com shows a lifetime receive total of 16.95724985 BTC, worth over $1.34 million at current prices. Three outbound transactions fired on the same day the thread went viral.

This is not the first time someone has recovered a long-lost wallet. In 2022, hardware researcher Joe Grand helped a man recover $3 million in Bitcoin by exploiting a flaw in the RoboForm password manager. But that case required two researchers, months of work, and a specific software vulnerability. This case required a chatbot and a laptop hard drive.

Between 2.3 million and 3.7 million BTC is estimated to be permanently lost, largely due to forgotten passwords. Claude's role here points to how AI tools might start chipping away at that number.

The full thread and the blockchain address breakdown are covered in detail at CryptoNewsLive.org, including screenshots, transaction history, and the exact recovery method @cprkrn described on X.

For the full story and ongoing crypto news: CryptoNewsLive.org

 Scary times ahead I'd say

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