Claude helps recover password to old Bitcoin wallet holding 5 BTC

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Eugene Komchuk

14.05.2026

Claude helps recover password to old Bitcoin wallet holding 5 BTC — How to find the password to lost Bitcoins

A user on X under the nickname cprkrn claims that Claude “cracked” a forgotten bitcoin wallet and helped recover 5 BTC from the user’s computer. However, Anthropic’s AI did not actually hack anything. It simply helped the owner find an old wallet file on their own computer, which was then decrypted using a password the user had already written down in a notebook.

Before that, the owner had spent eight weeks trying to brute-force the password to their current Blockchain.com wallet. They used the btcrecover service and rented computing power, testing roughly 3.5 trillion combinations.

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But we saved everything 🙂.

The breakthrough came when the user, as a last attempt, “dumped my whole college computer into Claude.” The assistant found an old wallet backup from December 2019. It was encrypted with a password the owner had once written down in a notebook.

The old password worked for the old backup, which contained the same private keys controlling the current funds. This is possible because bitcoin private keys do not change over time.

According to the user’s own post on X, the password was: “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”. The failed GPU brute-force attempts via Vast.ai cost around $15, while the successful recovery effectively came down to finding the right file.

Bitcoin was not hacked

It is important to understand that this was not a breach of Bitcoin’s cryptography. Actually breaking it would require either a working quantum computer capable of running Shor’s algorithm or the discovery of a vulnerability in elliptic-curve cryptography. No such vulnerability has been found in 16 years of public scrutiny.

In this case, the main problem was that wallet recovery usually requires technical knowledge that many owners of lost bitcoin simply do not have.

This is where AI assistants can help. Instead of manually searching through folders, dates, backups, and old files on storage devices, users can hand the task to an LLM. The model can identify patterns, narrow the search space, and surface potentially relevant files from years of accumulated digital clutter.

Millions of bitcoin are believed to remain inaccessible because owners lost passwords, hard drives, or seed phrases during the early years of the cryptocurrency.

With bitcoin trading at around $79,000, an old laptop in a closet could theoretically hold six figures in assets. That is why wallet data should be carefully backed up, seed phrases should not be stored only in memory, and old hardware should be checked before being sold or thrown away.

The most famous stories of lost Bitcoin

One of the most high-profile BTC loss cases is the story of programmer Stefan Thomas, who lost the password to an encrypted IronKey USB drive containing 7,002 BTC. The device allows only a limited number of password attempts before the data may be erased, which made Thomas’s story one of the clearest examples of the risks of self-custody in crypto.

Another well-known case involves British man James Howells, who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing private keys to thousands of BTC in 2013. For years, he tried to obtain permission to excavate a landfill site in Newport, but authorities refused due to environmental and legal risks.

As a reminder, earlier this year Anthropic launched the next generation of its models — Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6.

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