X User @cprkrn Becomes a Crypto Legend This Week

X user @cprkrn claimed to have used Anthropic's Claude to recover 5 BTC locked away for 11 years, worth about $400,000 at current prices. The post garnered over 10 million views within 12 hours.

@cprkrn bought 5 BTC while in college in 2014, changed the wallet password while high, and woke up having completely forgotten it. He had an old mnemonic phrase, but it didn't match the wallet file with the changed password. Over the next few years, he ran brute-force attacks using btcrecover and Hashcat, and even paid for commercial recovery services at $250 a pop, but all efforts were in vain.

Out of options, he packed all the files from his old college computer and fed them to Claude. Claude did three things: it dug out an older version of wallet.dat from before the password change among a pile of files; it discovered that btcrecover had reversed the concatenation order of the sharedKey and password during decryption, a bug that had gone unnoticed; and after fixing the logic, it ran the process once to extract the private key, converting it to WIF format (Wallet Import Format, the standard format for importing private keys into modern wallets) and imported it into the wallet. On-chain records show that all 5 BTC were transferred out that day.

Claude didn't brute-force the encryption, nor did it tamper with Bitcoin's cryptography. What it did was more like digital archaeology: finding the correct wallet version in old files, understanding the recovery tool's source code, and fixing a bug. The prerequisite was that the user already had the old mnemonic phrase and old computer files; if the private key were truly lost, AI would be just as helpless.

After the post went viral in the crypto community, figures like Nic Carter, Laura Shin, and Jesse Pollak shared it. However, many on Reddit poured cold water on the story, arguing that @cprkrn's original claim that "Claude cracked this thing" was pure exaggeration, and that Claude actually just helped him sift through files and tweak a few lines of code.