Claude helped a user get 5 Bitcoins back

How did Claude help regain access to the Bitcoin wallet?

One Bitcoin user’s post went viral on X after he claimed that Claude, an AI chatbot from Anthropic, helped him regain access to his old Bitcoin wallet.

That wallet contained 5 Bitcoins, worth about $320,000. The problem was that the user couldn’t get their hands on their coins for more than ten years.

A user who uses the pseudonym Cprkrn on X said in an interview with MTS that many years ago he used very complicated passwords on blockchain.info. After changing one of them, he eventually forgot about it. He had three passwords, but one was missing.

For the last eight weeks, he has been trying to guess the password with the help of AI using the brute force method. This means that the system tried a huge number of possible combinations, even trillions of passwords. But nothing worked.

Then he decided to try one more time. He collected old notebooks from college and the laptop he was using at the time, and used that information with Claude. The chatbot helped him find an old password and an important wallet backup file that matched that password.

In the end, this combination was enough to regain access to the Bitcoin wallet and his 5 BTC.

Source: cointelegraph

How Many Bitcoins Are Actually Lost?

Industry estimates say that between 2.3 and 4 million Bitcoins are unavailable today. This is approximately 11% to 19% of the total maximum supply of Bitcoin.

The reasons are mostly the same. People lose their seed phrase, forget their password, delete the backup file, lose their old laptop, or send coins to an address that no one has access to anymore. In some cases, the coins are intentionally “burned”, i.e. sent to an address from which they can no longer be returned.

That is why today there are entire companies that deal with the recovery of lost cryptocurrencies. Their job is to find old traces, backup files, passwords, and anything that can help the user get back to the wallet.

How did Cprkrn use Claude to recover Bitcoin?

Cprkrn searched for his seed phrase for eight weeks. In this, Claude helped him analyze a large amount of old data.

They searched two Macs, two external hard drives, an export from Apple Notes, iCloud Mail, a Gmail inbox, and messages from X. In total, we are talking about more than 1 GB of data.

One of these devices was his old laptop from college. It was there that Claude found an important wallet backup file from December 2019.

After that, Cprkrn, with Claude’s help, was able to decrypt the file using the password associated with the notes from the old notebook. That password eventually led him to a seed phrase for a Bitcoin wallet that hadn’t been used for years.

Cprkrn showed no direct evidence that Claude was actually searching for his devices. However, he shared a link to Blockchain.com explorer showing that about 5 BTC were transferred from the address “14VJy… ofuE6” through five transactions on May 13.

Prior to these transactions, these coins had not moved since the beginning of 2015. years.

Source: cointelegraph

More than 3.5 trillion passwords tested

Recovery failed on the first try. Before finding the right lead, Claude helped test a huge number of possible passwords.

First, they used BTCRecover, an open-source tool for recovering seed phrases and passwords associated with crypto wallets. With Python, they tested about 34 billion possible passwords using the brute force method.

Brute force means that a large number of combinations are tried in turn until the right one is found. With strong and complicated passwords, this can take a very long time, and often fails even after a huge number of attempts.

After that, they also used Hashcat, a well-known password recovery tool. They tested about 3.4 trillion more combinations with it, but even that was not enough.

According to Claude’s summary of the entire process, only about $15 was spent on AI computer processing. This does not mean that the recovery was easy, but that the key part was to find the right trace among the old data, and not just randomly guess the password.

Source: cointelegraph

What can we learn from this case?

This case shows how important it is to properly store seed phrases, passwords, and backup files. With Bitcoin, there is no customer support that can reset your password. If you lose access to your wallet, your coins can stay locked forever.

The AI here did not “hack” Bitcoin or break the security of the blockchain. It helped the user connect old clues, find important files, and put together a logical path to the password. That’s a big difference.

That is why AI is likely to play an increasing role in the recovery of lost wallets in the future. Not because it will break Bitcoin, but because it can quickly view old documents, emails, notes, hard drives, and backup files. It can find patterns that one would easily overlook.

Source: cointelegraph

Will AI and quantum computers bring back lost Bitcoins?

AI can help, but only if there is a clue. It can be an old password, part of a seed phrase, a wallet backup, a note, a screenshot, or a file that the user has forgotten. If there is nothing, AI cannot magically restore access.

Quantum computers are often mentioned in the context of Bitcoin, but you need to be careful here. It could speed up certain types of calculations in the future, but that doesn’t mean that all old Bitcoin wallets will suddenly become available. Bitcoin security does not depend on a single simple password, but on cryptography that is designed to be extremely difficult to crack.

If quantum computers become powerful enough one day, the crypto industry will have to adapt. We are likely to see new security standards, new types of addresses, and better protection for private keys. However, the most important thing for the recovery of lost wallets will still be the old traces left behind by the user.

Source: cointelegraph

Conclusion

The story of Cprkrn and Claude is a good example of how AI can be a useful tool in the crypto world. Not as a magic solution, but as an assistant that can analyze a lot of data, connect details and speed up a process that would take a person weeks or months.

In the future, the recovery of lost Bitcoin wallets is likely to become a more serious niche. The combination of AI tools, specialized software, forensic analysis of devices, and a better understanding of old wallet systems could help many users who thought their coins were lost forever.

But the main lesson remains the same. The best recovery is the one you never need. A seed phrase should be kept safe, offline, and in multiple trusted places. Because when it comes to Bitcoin, control over private keys means control over coins.

Napomena: Ovaj članak služi isključivo u informativne svrhe i ne predstavlja financijski, investicijski, porezni niti pravni savjet. Kriptovalute nose rizik gubitka vrijednosti. Korisnici bi prije donošenja bilo kakvih odluka trebali samostalno procijeniti rizike povezane s kriptoimovinom.