AI Claude Cracks Bitcoin Wallet for $15 After 11 Years and 3.5 Trillion Password Attempts

A Bitcoin wallet owner with the nickname 'cprkrn' had lost access to his wallet about eleven years ago when he changed the password while under the influence of drugs. He had bought five Bitcoins during his student years, each worth $250, which are now worth over $400,000. Over the years, he tried various methods, including the open-source tool btcrecover using brute-force, which attempted more than 3.5 trillion passwords without success. In desperation, he turned to Anthropic's Claude AI, providing it with data from his old laptop used to access the wallet, and a mnemonic that hinted at a previous password. Claude found an old wallet file on the laptop that could be decrypted with the mnemonic. The AI explained that the private keys of wallets never change, only the encryption around them changes when a password is changed. Using the old password, Claude identified a flaw where passwords were incorrectly mapped to the private key. Once fixed, btcrecover was able to crack the password. The entire operation cost about $15 in computing power.