According to monitoring by Beating, X user @cprkrn claimed to have recovered 5 BTC locked for 11 years using Anthropic’s Claude, worth approximately $400,000 at current prices. The post surpassed 10 million views within 12 hours. In 2014, while in college, @cprkrn purchased 5 BTC, changed his wallet password after getting high, and forgot it entirely upon waking. He had an old mnemonic phrase, but it did not match the password-modified wallet file. Over the following years, he attempted brute-force cracking using btcrecover and Hashcat, and paid for commercial recovery services costing $250 each—all of which failed. In desperation, he packaged all files from his old college computer and fed them to Claude. Claude did three things: it located an older version of the wallet.dat file from before the password was changed; discovered that btcrecover had incorrectly reversed the concatenation order of sharedKey and password—a previously undetected bug; and after correcting the logic, successfully extracted the private key on the first attempt, converting it to WIF format (Wallet Import Format, the standard for importing private keys into modern wallets). On-chain records show that the full 5 BTC were transferred out that day. Claude did not brute-force the encryption or interfere with Bitcoin’s cryptography. Instead, its actions resembled digital archaeology: locating the correct wallet version among old files and understanding the recovery tool’s source code to fix a bug. This was only possible because the user already possessed the old mnemonic phrase and computer files—AI cannot recover private keys if they are completely lost. After the post spread through the crypto community, figures such as Nic Carter, Laura Shin, and Jesse Pollak shared it widely. However, many on Reddit pushed back, arguing that @cprkrn’s claim that “Claude cracked this” was exaggerated; in reality, Claude merely helped him sift through files and adjust a few lines of code.
User Recovers 5 BTC Lost 11 Years Ago with Claude’s Help
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Summary
Today’s BTC news breaks as a user on X, @cprkrn, claims to have recovered 5 BTC that had been locked for 11 years with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude. The Bitcoin was purchased in 2014, but the wallet password was changed while under the influence and subsequently forgotten. Tools such as btcrecover and Hashcat failed until Claude analyzed old university files, located a wallet.dat file, corrected a decryption bug, and extracted the private key in WIF format. The 5 BTC were successfully transferred. The post garnered 10 million views within 12 hours and was shared by crypto influencers, though some Reddit users questioned its credibility. This BTC update highlights AI’s potential to resolve long-standing cryptocurrency challenges.
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