A Bitcoin holder known as cprkrn on X (Twitter) has recovered 5 BTC from a wallet locked for over 11 years, worth nearly $400,000 at current prices, by using Anthropic's Claude AI. The user uploaded files from his old college computer to Claude, which located an encrypted wallet file and debugged the open-source tool btcrecover. The chatbot identified that btcrecover concatenates a sharedKey value with the user password during decryption, allowing the private keys to be decrypted on the first corrected run. The recovery hinged on a mnemonic the user rediscovered weeks earlier. He had previously paid roughly $250 per failed attempt at commercial services. The story gained over a million views within hours, with experts noting it as proof of how general-purpose AI can now handle specialized cybersecurity and debugging tasks. This case adds to a growing list of recoveries from long-dormant addresses, with roughly a third of all Bitcoin supply held in wallets that have not moved in years. The technique's applicability to other forgotten wallets depends on the files holders kept from earlier years.

Key facts

• Recovered 5 BTC from an 11-year-old wallet using Anthropic's Claude AI.
• Claude debugged btcrecover's password logic to decrypt the private keys.
• User previously spent ~$250 per failed attempt on commercial recovery services.
• Story gained over 1 million views on X, with experts calling it groundbreaking.
• Roughly one-third of Bitcoin supply remains in wallets untouched for years.

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