A viral post from X claims that Claude ‘cracked’ a forgotten bitcoin wallet to recover 5 BTC from a user’s computer.
But don’t get caught up in the hype, as that’s not what happened. Anthropic’s AI simply helped the owner search his own computer for an old wallet file, which was then decrypted with a password the owner had already written down in a notebook.
User cprkrn posted the recovery on Wednesday, calling it “the most obvious opening ever” once they discovered what had happened.
The owner had been trying for eight weeks to hack the password to his current Blockchain.com wallet, trying approximately 3.5 billion combinations using the btcrecover service on a rented computer chip.
The recovery occurred when the user “dumped my entire college computer on Claude” as a last-ditch effort, and the assistant located a backup of an old wallet from December 2019 that was encrypted with a password the user had already written down in a notebook.
The old password decrypted the previous backup, which contained the same private keys that controlled the current funds, since bitcoin private keys never change.
The password itself was “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)” according to user’s X disclosure. GPU Vast.ai’s total spend on failed brute force attempts was around $15, and recovery was effectively a file search.
For context, breaking bitcoin’s actual cryptography would require a working quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm or a flaw in elliptic curve cryptography that has not been found in 16 years of public scrutiny.
CoinDesk’s post-quantum security series earlier this year covered timeline expectations for that threat, with most researchers placing the cryptographically relevant quantum computer at least five to ten years out.
But the user experience opens another door for AI within cryptocurrencies. Forgotten wallets from bitcoin’s early years now have great value, and recovery tools like btcrecover have been around for years to help users try password variations on encrypted wallet files.
The problem has always been that most recovery work requires technical expertise that the average owner of lost bitcoins does not have.
That’s where AI assistants can step in. Instead of manually sorting folders, timestamps, and backup files through years of accumulated disk clutter, owners can hand the search over to an LLM and have it identify patterns, reduce search space, and display candidate files.
It is believed that millions of bitcoins remain inaccessible because owners lost passwords, drives or recovery phrases during the early years.
With bitcoin trading around $79,000, a forgotten laptop in a closet could hold six figures. Back up wallet data carefully, store recovery phrases somewhere other than your memory, and check old hardware before selling it.
