A recent post by a Bitcoiner has gained significant attention on X, where the user shared a remarkable story about recovering 5 Bitcoin, valued at approximately $320,000, with the help of Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude. The user, known by the pseudonym Cprkrn, detailed in an interview the difficulties he faced in accessing his Bitcoin after forgetting one of three complex passwords created over a decade ago on blockchain.info.
For eight weeks, Cprkrn had attempted to harness AI technology to brute-force trillions of potential passwords but encountered no success. His efforts were deemed a last-ditch attempt before he turned to the AI for assistance. This included compiling his old college notes and a laptop that he had previously used, eventually leading Claude to help him recover an old password and a vital wallet backup file associated with it, enabling access to his long-dormant Bitcoin wallet.
Industry experts estimate that between 2.3 million and 4 million Bitcoin remains unrecoverable, equating to roughly 11% to 19% of Bitcoin’s total supply, mainly due to lost seed phrases, forgotten passwords, and other misfortunes. The growing issue has led to the emergence of businesses focused on helping users recover lost cryptocurrency.
Cprkrn described his search as an extensive effort over eight weeks, during which Claude combed through data from two Mac computers, two external hard drives, exports from Apple Notes, iCloud Mail, Gmail, and messages from X, amounting to over 1 gigabyte of information. Among these devices, Claude located a critical wallet backup file from December 2019. With its assistance, Cprkrn decrypted the file using a password derived from a mnemonic found in his notes, ultimately leading him to discover the seed phrase for his Bitcoin wallet.
While Cprkrn shared a link to Blockchain.com showing five Bitcoin transferred from a specific wallet address in May, the coins had remained idle since early 2015. Cprkrn’s recovery saga involved significant efforts: Claude initially tested around 34 billion passwords using an open-source seed recovery tool named BTCRecover before conducting further tests with the password recovery program Hashcat, which combed through an astounding 3.4 trillion passwords in total. Remarkably, the AI’s computations cost him merely $15.
Despite the excitement surrounding this story, some in the cryptocurrency community have raised eyebrows over Cprkrn’s claims about Claude’s contribution. Critics argue that the AI was primarily utilized for searching rather than directly cracking the wallet itself. One user noted on Reddit that Claude merely assisted in file searches, rather than performing any groundbreaking tasks related to password recovery.
Cprkrn’s experience underscores the complexities surrounding cryptocurrency access and the potential for AI technology to aid in reclaiming lost assets, even as mixed opinions emerge regarding the extent of its contributions in such situations.
