AI Helped Recover 5 BTC From 11-Year Locked Wallet

A Bitcoin holder who posted as cprkrn on X recovered 5 BTC from a wallet that had been inaccessible for more than 11 years after uploading files from an old college computer into Anthropic’s Claude AI. The user reported the recovery after a last-ditch attempt following several failed commercial recovery efforts.

According to screenshots and the user’s account, Claude identified an encrypted wallet file among the uploaded data and then worked with btcrecover, an open-source wallet recovery utility. The screenshots show Claude tracing the recovery routine, finding that btcrecover concatenates a sharedKey value with the user password during decryption, adjusting the input and producing a successful decryption of the private keys.

The recovered private keys were converted to Wallet Import Format so the holder could move the funds. The user also said he had rediscovered a mnemonic phrase weeks earlier. He set the original password while in college and later changed it, which left the coins inaccessible until the recent effort. The user said he had paid roughly $250 per failed attempt with commercial services before turning to AI.

With Bitcoin trading around $79,622, the five coins are worth about $398,000 at current prices. The post drew more than one million views within hours. Castle Island Ventures partner Nic Carter called the result “insane.” Several other figures in the crypto community flagged the recovery as notable.

Security experts noted the episode as an example of a general-purpose AI performing specialised debugging and security tasks that previously required manual analysis. btcrecover is widely used when users remember parts of passphrases or keys; in this case Claude mapped how the tool combined a sharedKey and password, corrected the input flow and achieved decryption on the corrected run.

Blockchain analytics firm Glassnode reports that roughly one-third of Bitcoin’s supply sits in wallets that have not moved in years. Whether similar recoveries will succeed for other forgotten wallets depends on what files holders still keep, including encrypted wallet data, mnemonic phrases or password fragments. The user advised others to preserve and upload files from old machines and notebooks before abandoning recovery attempts.