An 11-year search for a lost Bitcoin password has ended with the help of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, unlocking a crypto wallet now worth just under $400,000.
The owner, who goes by the online alias “cprkrn” and keeps his real identity private, bought 5 Bitcoin in 2015 and promptly forgot the crucial part of a complex, three-stage password scheme he set up while high. The funds then sat untouched for more than a decade.
According to his account, “cprkrn” originally purchased the 5 BTC at a Starbucks in 2015, when each coin cost about $250. The coins were held in a Blockchain.com wallet protected by three passwords. He still remembered two of them, but at some point he changed the third while stoned and never managed to recall it.
For years, he tried to get back in. Earlier attempts included brute-force efforts to guess the missing credential, with Claude estimating that it had already chewed through around 3.5 trillion password strings without success. He even made a trip back to his parents’ house to dig through old college notebooks, manually entering anything that looked like it might be a password or seed phrase that could help the AI narrow down the options.
The turning point came when he supplied Claude with an old mnemonic phrase and gave it access to his former college computer. Over an eight-week period, the AI combed the machine’s files looking for anything that could be tied to the forgotten wallet setup.
Last tweet + muting, asked Claude to summarize our recovery efforts:
TLDR, tried ~3.5 trillion passwords + none worked, ended up matching an old seed phrase found in a college notebook with an old wallet file 🙂 pic.twitter.com/iOaIIVsiHd
Claude eventually located a wallet backup on the old PC. That backup could be decrypted using the mnemonic phrase “cprkrn” had held onto, which in turn provided the private keys needed to access the Blockchain.com wallet.
An overview of the recovery process, written by Claude itself, described how accessing the backup file allowed the user to bypass the missing third password and regain control of the funds. Blockchain.com’s transaction history shows the coins had been dormant since April 2015, until they were finally moved out of the wallet on a Wednesday this year.
A ridiculous password and a serious lesson
Once the dust settled, the user discovered what the elusive third password actually was: lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:) , a deliberately complex but hardly memorable string he had set while stoned 11 years earlier.
He told web show MTSlive that the ordeal stretched for more than a decade and that he’d effectively locked himself out by overcomplicating his own security. The successful recovery, however, has left him so grateful that he’s jokingly vowed to name his future children after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
The case underlines a tension familiar to anyone managing digital assets: strong, unique passwords and multi-step protection are essential, but they only work if the owner can realistically recover them. In this instance, a bizarre and highly specific password, coupled with a long-lost backup and a half-remembered mnemonic, created a puzzle that only a persistent AI search across old local files could finally piece together.
For Anthropic’s Claude, it’s an unusual but striking example of how large-scale language models and automation can augment human persistence and, at least this time, turn a half-baked security decision into a life-changing windfall rather than a permanent loss.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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