Overview
- Cprkrn, a pseudonymous X user who regained access to an old wallet, moved roughly 5 BTC on Wednesday after Claude found an older backup that matched a mnemonic he had saved.
- Public blockchain records show the address starting 14VJy…ofuE6 sent about 5 BTC across five transactions on May 13 after sitting idle since 2015.
- Reporters and recovery experts say Claude did not crack encryption and instead sifted old files, identified a 2019 wallet backup, and flagged a btcrecover command fix that correctly joined a sharedKey with the password.
- The owner had spent weeks trying trillions of password guesses with tools like BTCRecover and Hashcat and about $15 in rented compute, and earlier attempts with paid recovery services also failed.
- The recovery highlights how AI could lower the skill and cost barriers for reviving dormant crypto, even as security pros warn that uploading wallet files or seed phrases to external AI services can expose funds.