Lost 5 BTC in college after forgetting the password, recovered 11 years later with Claude's help searching the old computer

According to 动察 Beating monitoring, X user @cprkrn claimed to have recovered 5 BTC, locked for 11 years and worth approximately $400,000 at the current price, using Anthropic's Claude. The post garnered over 10 million views within 12 hours.

In 2014, when @cprkrn was in college, they bought 5 BTC and, after partying, changed their wallet password, only to completely forget it upon sobering up. They had an old mnemonic, but it didn't match the wallet file with the new password. Over the following years, they tried brute-forcing with btcrecover and Hashcat, and paid for commercial recovery services at $250 each time, but to no avail.

At a dead end, they packaged all files from their old college laptop and fed them to Claude. Claude did three things: it found an old version of wallet.dat from before the password change among the files; discovered that when btcrecover was decrypting, it had the concatenation order of sharedKey and the password reversed—a bug that had never been found; and after correcting the logic, ran the process once more to extract the private key, converted it to WIF format (Wallet Import Format, the standard for importing private keys into modern wallets), and imported it into the wallet. On-chain records show that all 5 BTC were transferred out the same day.

Claude did not brute-force any encryption, nor did it tamper with Bitcoin's cryptography. Its job was more like digital archaeology: finding the correct wallet version in old files, reading and understanding the recovery tool's source code, and fixing a bug. The prerequisite is that the user already possesses the old mnemonic and old computer files—if the private key is completely lost, even AI cannot help.

After the post circulated in the crypto community, figures such as Nic Carter, Laura Shin, and Jesse Pollak reposted it. But many people on Reddit were skeptical, believing the original claim—“Claude cracked the thing”—to be exaggerated, and that in reality, Claude just dug through some files and fixed a couple of lines of code.