Claude AI Recovers 11-Year-Old Bitcoin Wallet Worth $400K by Finding Backup and Fixing Brute-Force Bug

A Bitcoin holder who lost their wallet password while 'stoned' 11 years ago recovered 5 BTC (~$400K) using Anthropic's Claude AI. According to X user cprkrn, they had been trying to brute-force their way in with btcrecover but failed. After finding an old mnemonic seed phrase in a college notebook that matched an encrypted wallet file, they dumped their entire college computer files into Claude as a last resort.

Claude discovered an older backup wallet file from December 2019 hidden in the data. The AI also identified a bug: the shared key and passwords that btcrecover was trying weren't being combined properly. Once the bug was fixed and the older wallet (predating the password change) was used, Claude ran btcrecover successfully and decrypted the private keys. The user then transferred the 5 BTC to a current wallet.

Early cryptocurrency wallets often mixed HD key trees (from seed phrases) with non-HD and imported keys stored in password-protected wallet files. This user's wallet contained specific keys that could not be recovered by seed phrase alone, requiring the password. The AI's ability to parse unstructured files and identify relevant backups and configuration issues proved critical.