Divine rescue! He used Claude to dig through an 11-year-old computer and successfully recovered 5 BTC

📄Full Article· Automatically extracted by trafilaturaGemini 翻譯1696 words

An X user bought 5 BTC in 2015, then his wallet slept for 11 years after he "casually changed the password while high on drugs." During that time he tried various brute-force methods to no avail. The breakthrough was not faster compute, but handing his entire old college-era computer over to Claude. (Previously: Claude Code launches Agent View — manage all AI agents on a single screen, ending multi-terminal chaos) (Background: Anthropic requires real-name KYC verification! Some Claude features will require uploading ID documents, expanding compliance pressure) One of the most regret-inducing events in the cryptocurrency world is obtaining Bitcoin in the early days and then losing the private key for various reasons — more painful than blowing up a futures account. But late last night, X user @cprkrn posted describing how he recovered 5 BTC that had been sleeping for 11 years from his old college computer. At the price at the time of posting, this sum was worth about $400,000 USD. HOLY FUCKING SHIT OMG CLAUDE JUST CRACKED THIS SHIT, THANK YOU @AnthropicAI THANK YOU @DarioAmodei NAMING MY KID AFTER YOU 😍https://t.co/gObNirRDpS https://t.co/ByTdIM4d20 pic.twitter.com/xB5LUJb6Pe — 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026 The on-chain records are clear. Based on the address he provided, 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6, it first received 0.25462585 BTC in December 2014, and another 5 BTC in April 2015, when Bitcoin was around $250 USD, for an entry cost of about $1,250. After that, the address went silent for over 11 years, with no outgoing transactions whatsoever. @cprkrn recounted: "Because he changed the password after getting high," but the seed phrase he recorded at the time, for some unknown reason, could not unlock the wallet, and as a result he was locked out of the wallet for over 11 years. Before using Claude, @cprkrn first went through the standard password recovery route for a full 8 weeks. Phase one used btcrecover: an open-source Python tool that runs dictionary attacks and rule-based transformations on CPU, at about 300,000 passwords per second. It tries every password variation you can think of (adding numbers, changing case, adding special characters) one by one. This method cumulatively tested about 34 billion password combinations, with no hits. Phase two upgraded to Hashcat, switching to GPU acceleration. He rented an RTX 4090 on the Vast.ai platform, pushing the speed to about 148 million passwords per second. Vast.ai is a cloud GPU rental platform, meaning you can rent high-end graphics cards by the hour to run brute-force attacks. Over two months, he cumulatively tested about 3.4 trillion password combinations, still without success. Blockchain.com wallets have a "second password" design. In addition to the login password, users can set up another password specifically for encrypting the private keys inside the wallet file. This second password exists only in the user's head; Blockchain.com's server has no copy. What @cprkrn casually changed 11 years ago while high on weed was precisely this layer. After 8 weeks, 3.5 trillion attempts, and total failure, he dumped all the data from his entire old college computer into Claude. @cprkrn's later summary: Claude combed through 2 Macs, 2 external hard drives, 1,684 stream-of-consciousness messages in Twitter DMs, paper notebooks, Apple Notes exports, iCloud Mail, and a Gmail mbox export over 1GB in size. Eventually, Claude found an old wallet backup file downloaded in December 2019 that he himself had forgotten existed. He also found an old version of the seed phrase in his college notebook — a string of 12 to 24 English words that can be used to reconstruct the private key. This seed phrase could unlock that old backup file, and the private key stored in that backup file finally allowed him to regain control of his Bitcoin wallet. It must be emphasized that there is no technical revolutionary breakthrough here: the seed phrase had long existed, and the old backup file had long been on the hard drive. The breakthrough was that someone (or some tool) could recognize "this combination is worth trying" amid a pile of messy old files. AI's role here was not as a password-cracking tool, but as a super-patient assistant for digging through old records. Congratulations @cprkrn

Data Status✓ Full text extractedRead Original (動區 BlockTempo)

🔍Historical Similar Events· Keyword + Asset Matching6 items

2026-05-13

Bitcoin Owner Claims Claude AI Cracked Lost Wallet Password, Netting $400K in BTC

Similarity 330%標的 BTC關鍵字 claude/btc

2026-05-13

Bitcoin Holder Recovers 5 BTC From 11-Year Locked Wallet Using Claude AI

Similarity 330%標的 BTC關鍵字 claude/btc

2026-05-13

Bitcoiner Dumps Old Computer Files Into Claude AI, Recovers 5 BTC Lost Since 2015

Similarity 330%標的 BTC關鍵字 claude/btc

2026-05-22