A user on X, posting as @cprkrn, has made headlines after claiming to have regained access to 5 Bitcoin that he had lost for over a decade due to a forgotten password. The recovery was reportedly made possible with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. After unsuccessfully trying to remember the password, the user turned to tools for brute-force guessing and ultimately involved Claude, which helped him piece together the necessary components.
In 2015, @cprkrn purchased the 5 BTC from a seller on LocalBitcoins while sitting in a Starbucks, paying around $250 for each coin. He stored the Bitcoin in a Blockchain.com wallet and originally backed up his account with a mnemonic phrase. However, shortly after acquiring the coins, he altered his password to an extravagant phrase, which he then forgot. He was able to recall two parts of the password but couldn’t find the third, leaving his investment in digital limbo for over a decade.
For more than eleven years, he attempted various methods to recover the Bitcoin. He utilized a tool called btcrecover to brute-force approximately 3.5 trillion password combinations, spending about $15 on GPU rentals. Additionally, he scoured old college notes for anything resembling passwords or seed phrases. A few weeks before his major breakthrough, he rediscovered the original mnemonic in an old notebook, but it was incompatible with the current wallet file.
In April, he decided to take a final shot at recovery by uploading the files from his old college laptop to Claude. Over eight weeks, the AI scanned the contents and located an encrypted wallet backup from December 2019. This older backup decrypted smoothly with the mnemonic phrase he had rediscovered and revealed the necessary private keys. On Wednesday, public blockchain records confirmed a transfer of 5 BTC from the once-dormant wallet, valued at just under $400,000 based on current Bitcoin prices. The user quickly transferred the funds to a new address to ensure their safety.
Despite @cprkrn’s enthusiastic claim that Claude “cracked” the wallet, the process did not involve breaching Bitcoin’s cryptographic protections. Instead, it was a matter of matching stored data, as the private keys had not changed. The recovery highlighted the importance of proper data management, as the breakthrough came from locating the correct backup rather than breaking cryptographic barriers.
The incident stands in stark contrast to the rising security concerns within the cryptocurrency space, where AI is increasingly being utilized in hacking operations against blockchain systems. Recent data indicates that 2023 saw a record number of security incidents, with April alone witnessing 29 hacks that resulted in losses exceeding $651 million. Among these, high-profile attacks on Drift Protocol and Kelp DAO siphoned off substantial funds through sophisticated methods, including social engineering.
In response to these threats, the centralized aspects of decentralized finance (DeFi) systems have been highlighted, as seen with the actions taken by Security Councils in the wake of these attacks. While the user who regained access to his Bitcoin expressed joy over his recovery, he also mentioned that he had no intention of going viral again and preferred to keep his experience private, despite it being the “best day of his life.”
