A Bitcoin holder known on 2015.
The story behind the recovery is as unusual as its outcome. While a student, @cprkrn changed the password of a Bitcoin wallet while drunk and forgot the new credentials. It still had an old mnemonic phrase – the seed phrase used to generate the wallet – but it no longer opened the current wallet file. Years of attempts followed.
He spent about $250 on professional recovery services, exhausted brute force software testing about 7 trillion password combinations, and eventually abandoned conventional methods altogether, according to his X thread. He held on until Bitcoin crossed $100,000 before launching one last serious attempt.
HOLY SHIT OMG CLAUDE JUST CRUSHED THIS SHIT, THANK YOU @AnthropicAI THANK YOU @DarioAmodei NAME MY CHILD AFTER YOU 😍 pic.twitter.com/xB5LUJb6Pe
— 🍜 (@cprkrn) May 13, 2026
Bitcoin found: how Claude actually did it
The recovery was not a case of AI breaking Bitcoin’s encryption. Wallet recovery experts who reviewed the The distinction is important and @cprkrn’s own account confirms it.
His approach was simple. He downloaded everything from his old university computer – files, documents, notes and backups – directly into Claude. The AI identified an old wallet file in data from before the password change, then located the precise reason why the mnemonic no longer worked on the current file: a bug in btcrecover, an open source Bitcoin wallet recovery utility, was concatenating a shared key with the password in the wrong order.
Claude identified the bug, fixed the decryption logic, executed the process and extracted the private keys in Wallet Import format. Claude’s output, which @cprkrn screenshotted and posted on X, read: “PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! WE GOT IT!!! ALL 5 BTC IS YOURS!”
Blockchair blockchain data confirmed that the wallet at address 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6 had not shown any transaction activity since 2015 until today, when outgoing transfers consistent with a recovery and migration of the wallet appeared.
The thread that went viral
@cprkrn’s X-rated posts generated over 6 million views within hours of posting, attracting responses from prominent crypto figures including Nic Carter, Laura Shin, and Jesse Pollak. In a follow-up article summarizing the method for others in similar situations, he wrote: “Just mega-dump all your computers and laptops into Claude. » He also publicly thanked Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei directly.
The coins were initially purchased at around $250 per Bitcoin – a total investment of $1,250 that remained locked and inaccessible for two full market cycles before finally being recouped.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $79,300, meaning that the 5 BTC recovered now represents a return of around 32,500% on the original purchase price – eleven years later.
BTC's price sees some gains following a steep decline, as per the daily chart. Source: BTCUSD on Tradingview
Cover image of Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview
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