Artificial intelligence has long since moved beyond just helping with writing texts or generating images. It’s now becoming clear that it can play an important role in the world of cryptocurrencies as well – and in some cases, literally save millions. A story is now going viral on social network X about an investor going by the username Cprkrn, who claims that thanks to Claude, an AI chatbot from Anthropic, he regained access to five bitcoins that he hadn’t been able to reach for more than ten years.
Five bitcoins are worth approximately $320,000 at current prices, or roughly seven million Czech crowns. The investor lost access to his wallet due to a forgotten password and for many years was unable to recover his cryptocurrency.
Table of Contents:
Forgotten Password and Years Without Access
In an interview with MTS, the user explained that he had previously created very complicated passwords on the Blockchain.info platform – today’s Blockchain.com. However, after one password change, he forgot one of three important passwords, thus losing the ability to access his bitcoin wallet.
Over the past eight weeks, according to his account, he attempted to use AI to crack “trillions of password combinations,” but without success. The breakthrough came when he uploaded old college notes, notebooks, and archived data from several devices into the system.
Claude subsequently analyzed more than one gigabyte of data from various sources. It searched two Mac computers, two external drives, an Apple Notes export, emails from iCloud and Gmail, and also old messages on network X.
Mohlo by Vás zajímat: Jak si vybrat správnou burzu pro obchodování svých kryptoměn?
Old File from 2019 Changed Everything
The key moment was finding a backup wallet file from December 2019 on one of the old university computers. According to the investor, Claude helped identify the correct file and subsequently assisted with its decryption using a password derived from notes in a notebook.
Thanks to this, they managed to recover the seed phrase and gain access to the long-inactive bitcoin wallet.
Although the investor did not publish direct proof that Claude actually searched his devices, he did share a link to a blockchain explorer from Blockchain.com, according to which approximately five bitcoins were sent from address “14VJy…ofuE6” on May 13 in five transactions.
Prior to these transfers, the coins had been inactive since early 2015.
AI Tested Trillions of Passwords
Part of the entire process also involved brute force attack attempts, meaning automated testing of enormous numbers of passwords. According to published information, Claude used the open-source tool BTCRecover and the Python programming language, testing approximately 34 billion passwords.
Another attempt ran through the Hashcat tool, which tried an additional 3.4 trillion combinations. However, even that alone was not enough to succeed.
Interestingly, according to Claude’s summary, the total cost of AI computing power reportedly came to only $15.
Čtěte také: yPredict: Revoluční platforma pro predikci kryptoměn
Millions of Bitcoins Are Lost Forever
The story also serves as a reminder of a huge problem in the cryptocurrency market – lost seed phrases and inaccessible wallets. Estimates indicate that between 2.3 and 4 million bitcoins are probably irretrievably lost. This represents approximately 11 to 19 percent of Bitcoin’s maximum possible supply.
The reasons are usually forgotten passwords, lost seed phrases, destroyed drives, or the death of owners without passing on access credentials. Moreover, due to rising cryptocurrency prices, entire companies now specialize precisely in recovering lost crypto wallets.
Community Debated AI’s Actual Role
Although the story generated significant attention, part of the cryptocurrency community points out that Claude’s role may have been exaggerated. Critics claim that the AI didn’t “crack” the wallet itself, but merely helped with organizing and searching data.
For example, a Reddit user going by the username MeteorSwarmGallifrey wrote that “Claude did nothing more than file searching” and that there was nothing groundbreaking about the entire process.
Even so, the case demonstrates how quickly artificial intelligence is beginning to penetrate even areas that until recently seemed purely technical or hacker-oriented. And for some investors, AI may become the last hope in the future for recovering lost cryptocurrency fortunes.
Mohlo by se Vám líbit: Bitcoin čeká na Fed
