A cryptocurrency investor had Claude retrieve a large amount of old devices and emails, ultimately successfully recovering Bitcoin that was lost for ten years.

Written by: Brayden Lindrea

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News⁠

A Bitcoin holder sparked discussions by posting on the X platform, claiming that with the help of Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude, he recovered about 5 Bitcoins worth approximately $320,000 that had been forgotten for over a decade.

Recently, anonymous X user Cprkrn stated in an interview with MTS that years ago, he set up a very complex multi-layer password on Blockchain.info, and after several modifications, one set of passwords was completely forgotten.

Cprkrn revealed that over the past eight weeks, he attempted to use AI to brute-force trillions of password combinations but had no progress.

Then earlier this week, with a final attempt mindset, he organized all the paper notes and old laptops from his college years and handed them all over to Claude for analysis and retrieval. Eventually, the AI helped him recover the forgotten old password along with a critical wallet backup file, allowing him to successfully unlock the Bitcoin wallet that had been dormant for many years.

Industry reports statistics show that due to forgotten mnemonic phrases, lost private keys, and assets being permanently destroyed, approximately 2.3 million to 4 million Bitcoins are currently in a state of permanent un-recoverability, accounting for 11%-19% of the total Bitcoin supply. There are even commercial services specifically developed to help users recover lost cryptocurrency assets.

So how did Cprkrn use Claude to recover the Bitcoin?

This search for the mnemonic phrase lasted eight weeks. Claude helped him retrieve and organize a massive amount of data, including two Mac devices, two external hard drives, Apple Notes export documents, iCloud emails, Gmail inboxes, and X platform chat records, analyzing over 1GB of data in total.

One of these was an old computer he used during his college years, where Claude found a critical wallet backup file from December 2019.

Afterward, with Claude's help, Cprkrn deduced the password based on memory clues from the paper notes, successfully decrypted the backup file, and ultimately unearthed the mnemonic phrase for the dormant wallet, successfully unlocking Bitcoin.

Although Cprkrn did not directly present evidence of the retrieval process involving Claude, he shared a Blockchain.com blockchain explorer link: the wallet address 14VJy…ofuE6 transferred about 5 Bitcoins in 5 transactions on May 13.

On-chain records show that this batch of Bitcoins had been in a dormant state since early 2015, with a sleep time exceeding ten years.

This recovery process was not instant. Before succeeding, Claude tested over 3.5 trillion passwords. Claude first called upon the open-source mnemonic recovery tool BTCRecover and Python programs, brute-forcing approximately 34 billion password combinations, which ended in failure.

Then with the help of the password cracking tool Hashcat, it continued testing 3.4 trillion password combinations, all of which failed.

The entire massive retrieval and password trial cost only $15 in AI computing power, and Claude has reviewed and organized the complete recovery process.

Although Cprkrn successfully recovered the Bitcoin, many in the crypto community believe that the individual exaggerated Claude's actual role. Some opinions pointed out that Claude was only responsible for file retrieval and organization, and did not directly crack the wallet, which cannot be considered a groundbreaking technological feat.

Reddit user MeteorSwarmGallifrey commented in the technology section: "Claude was just helping him search and organize files from start to finish, and did not make any pioneering cracking actions."