A viral X post claims that Crowder “hacked” a forgotten Bitcoin wallet and recovered 5 Bitcoins from the user’s computer.
But don’t get caught up in the hype, because that’s not the case. Anthropic’s artificial intelligence simply helps owners search their computers for old wallet files and then decrypt the files using the password the owner has already written in a notebook.
User cprkrn posted the recovery process on Wednesday, calling it “the most obvious breach ever” once they figured out what was going on.
The wallet’s owner has been trying to brute force the passwords on the current Blockchain.com wallet for eight weeks, testing approximately 3.5 trillion combinations using the btcrecover service on rented computing chips.
The recovery occurred when the user “dumped my entire university computer into Claude” as a last-ditch effort, and the assistant found an old wallet backup from December 2019 that had been encrypted with a password the user had written in a notebook.
The old password decrypts the old backup, which contains the same private keys that control the current funds, because Bitcoin private keys never change.
According to the user’s own X disclosure, the password itself is “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”. The total spend on the Vast.ai GPU on a failed brute force attempt was about $15, and the recovery was essentially a file search.
For context, breaking Bitcoin’s actual cryptography would require a working quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm, or a flaw in elliptic curve cryptography that has yet to be discovered in 16 years of public scrutiny.
CoinDesk’s post-quantum security series earlier this year covered timeline expectations for the threat, with most researchers placing cryptographically relevant quantum computers at least five to ten years away.
But user experience has opened one door after another for artificial intelligence in the encryption field. Forgotten wallets from Bitcoin’s early days are now of significant value, and recovery tools like btcrecover have been around for years to help users test password changes against encrypted wallet files.
The problem is always that most recovery efforts require technical expertise that the average lost Bitcoin owner does not have.
This is where artificial intelligence assistants can step in. Instead of manually sorting through folders, timestamps, and backup files amid years of accumulated drive clutter, owners can offload the search to LLM and let it recognize patterns, narrow the search space, and surface candidate files.
It is believed that millions of Bitcoins remain inaccessible because the owners lost their passwords, drives or recovery phrases in the early years.
With Bitcoin trading around $79,000, a forgotten laptop in a closet could be hiding six figures. Back up your wallet data carefully, store recovery phrases somewhere other than your memory, and review old hardware before selling it.
