Claude just made old computers a possible bitcoin treasure

If you’ve ever lost access to your bitcoin (BTC), you might now be able to get help from AI, as a recent viral story showed.

While missing some details, a BTC owner, in a somewhat messy manner, shared that he was able to access his 5 BTC after more than 11 years.

The problems began when @cprkrn "got stoned" and changed the password to his bitcoin wallet. Then, he forgot that it was "lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)". Years of attempts to guess the password went unsuccessfully, as the bitcoiner said he "tried like 7 trillion passwords" (for reference, there are 0.000347 trillion seconds in 11 years).

However, a few weeks ago, in a notebook, he apparently found his old seed phrase (incomplete) for the older blockchain.com wallet on his old college computer, but not for the locked wallet on his current computer. A seed phrase, or a combination of 12-24 words, allows you to access your whole wallet.

Next, @cprkrn gave Claude access to his old computer files and to this messy seed phrase. Then, AI found his old wallet file on this computer. According to Claude's summary of the rescue operation, AI managed to decrypt the incomplete old backup of this wallet and access the 5 BTC within.

The idea here is that these bitcoins in old and new wallets were protected by the same private keys that would allow the funds to be moved. When the stoned bitcoiner changed the password to his wallet, the private keys remained the same, so decrypting the old seed phrase helped recover access to the wallet and the lost BTC.

According to Claude's summary, it took 8 weeks of unsuccessfully using different tools such as BTCRecover, Hashcat, and others, and around 3.5 trillion passwords were tested. Also, around $15 was spent on GPU rent for this rescue operation.

The recovered funds were moved to a new address, while the lucky bitcoiner is now promising to name his kid after Claude or Dario Amodei, the CEO of its developer, Anthropic.

The story reminded many of how much BTC has been lost after users forgot passwords or lost their backups.

"I spent 5 years running support for a non-custodial wallet from 2013-2018.

I had to inform a staggering number of people that their funds were gone forever if they couldn't figure out their passwords. Probably 1M+ lost coins out there," a prominent bitcoiner, Mandrik, said.

As commenters online reacted, "suddenly every dusty hard drive feels like a lottery ticket."