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A cryptocurrency enthusiast has successfully recovered 5 BTC, valued at approximately USD500,000 (RM2,250,000), from a wallet that had remained inaccessible for over a decade
The user, known on X as @cprkrn, regained access to the funds by using Claude AI to resolve a long-standing technical issue.
His wallet had been locked since 2014 or 2015 after he changed the wallet's password while intoxicated during his college years.
Although he still had an old mnemonic phrase, it failed to unlock the current wallet file. Over the years, he exhausted conventional recovery methods, including spending roughly USD250 (RM1,125) on professional services and reportedly attempting nearly seven trillion password combinations to no avail.
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Image via Alesia Kozik/PexelsThe successful recovery was achieved not through brute force, but through high-level file parsing and debugging
Parsing is the process of a computer program reading a block of data — like a file — and breaking it down into a format so that the system can understand, analyse, or manipulate.
The person uploaded the entire contents of his old college computer — including various files, notebooks, and backups — into Claude. The AI system analysed the data, located an older wallet file that predated the password change, and identified a critical flaw in the recovery process.
The AI discovered that the widely used open-source recovery utility, btcrecover, was concatenating a shared key with the password in the incorrect order. Concatenating is the technical term for joining two or more pieces of information together end-to-end, like linking train carriages.
After Claude identified this bug and corrected the decryption logic, it successfully extracted the private keys in Wallet Import Format.
The output, shared by the person on social media, confirmed the decryption: "PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!"
While some observers raised questions regarding the security implications of uploading sensitive, albeit encrypted, data into an AI system, the process was successful because the user already possessed the correct password information
The X user concluded the thread by expressing profound gratitude to Anthropic, the company behind Claude, jokingly remarking that he would name his child after CEO Dario Amodei.
The recovered 5 BTC, which had sat dormant since 1 April 2015, were successfully swept out of the wallet immediately upon the recovery's completion.
