5 Bitcoins sealed away for 10 years, Claude helped him recover it for just $15

Author: Brayden Lindrea

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News⁠

A Bitcoin holder posted on the X platform, sparking heated discussion. He claimed to have used Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude to recover approximately five bitcoins worth about $320k that had been sealed away for over a decade.

Recently, anonymous X user Cprkrn told MTS in an interview that he had set up extremely complex multi-layer passwords on Blockchain.info in his early years, which he later modified multiple times, and 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 made no progress.

Then, at the beginning of this week, with a last-ditch effort in mind, he organized all his university notes, old laptops, and other materials, and handed them over to Claude for analysis and retrieval. Ultimately, the AI helped him recover the forgotten old password and a key wallet backup file, allowing him to successfully unlock the Bitcoin wallet that had been dormant for years.

Industry report statistics show that due to forgotten mnemonic phrases, lost private keys, and permanent asset destruction, approximately 2.3 million to 4 million bitcoins are currently in an unrecoverable state, accounting for 11%–19% of the total Bitcoin supply. There are even commercial services on the market specifically helping users recover lost crypto assets.

So, how did Cprkrn use Claude to recover his Bitcoin?

This mnemonic search process lasted eight weeks. Claude assisted him throughout, retrieving and organizing massive amounts of data, including two Mac devices, two external hard drives, exported Apple Notes documents, iCloud emails, Gmail inboxes, and X platform chat records, analyzing over 1GB of data in total.

One of the devices was an old computer used during his university days. Claude found a key wallet backup file from December 2019 inside.

Later, with Claude’s help, Cprkrn used clues from his paper notes to infer the password, successfully decrypted the backup file, and ultimately extracted the mnemonic phrase for the dormant wallet, successfully unlocking a Bitcoin.

Although Cprkrn did not directly show evidence of Claude’s retrieval process, he shared a Blockchain.com block explorer link: wallet address 14VJy…ofuE6, which transferred about five bitcoins in five transactions on May 13.

On-chain records show that this batch of Bitcoin has been dormant since early 2015, with a sleep time exceeding ten years.

This recovery process was not instantaneous. Before success, Claude tested over 35 trillion passwords. It first used open-source mnemonic recovery tools BTCRecover and Python scripts to brute-force about 34 billion combinations, but to no avail.

Then, with the help of the password cracking tool Hashcat, it continued testing 34 trillion combinations, but all attempts failed.

All this massive data retrieval and password trial cost only $15 in AI computing power, and Claude completed the entire recovery process.

Although Cprkrn successfully recovered his Bitcoin, many online crypto community members believe that the individual exaggerated Claude’s actual role. Some argue that Claude only assisted in file retrieval and organization, not directly cracking the wallet, and thus it is not a groundbreaking technological feat.

Reddit user MeteorSwarmGallifrey commented in the tech section: “Claude was just helping him browse and organize files from start to finish, without doing any pioneering cracking work.”