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A pseudonymous user on X claims he regained access to 5 bitcoin he had lost for more than a decade after forgetting the password—and it was Anthropic’s Claude chatbot that put all the pieces of the puzzle together for him. After feeding the model files from an old college laptop and attempting to guess trillions of passwords with the assistance of a few different tools, Claude delivered the final breakthrough that unlocked the wallet.
According to an interview with MTS, the man who posts on X as @cprkrn bought the 5 bitcoin from someone via the now-defunct trading platform LocalBitcoins while sitting in a Starbucks in 2015. Each coin cost about $250 at the time. He stored them in a Blockchain.com wallet and backed up the account with a mnemonic phrase. Soon afterward, while stoned, he changed the password to “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)” and promptly forgot it. He remembered two of the three password components but could never locate the third.
https://x.com/cprkrn/status/2054586810475364536
For the next 11 years, the bitcoin sat untouched. The user tried everything he could think of to recover the funds. He brute-forced roughly 3.5 trillion password combinations using the btcrecover tool on rented GPU power that cost him around $15. He drove to his parents’ house, dug through old college notebooks, and typed in every scrap of text that looked like a password or seed phrase. A few weeks before the final breakthrough, he rediscovered the original mnemonic phrase in one of those notebooks, but it still did not work with the current wallet file.
