Claude found a hidden December 2019 wallet backup and fixed a btcrecover key-combination bug, recovering 5 BTC (~$400k) lost for 11 years.
Key Takeaways
The actual blocker was a bug: btcrecover wasn’t combining the shared key and candidate passwords correctly; Claude diagnosed and fixed this.
Claude also surfaced an older pre-password-change wallet.dat backup buried in a college computer file dump, bypassing the encrypted version entirely.
User cprkrn had already tried btcrecover brute-force across 3.5 trillion passwords before involving Claude; the tool was right, the configuration was wrong.
Early Bitcoin wallets mixed HD and non-HD/imported keys; seed phrases alone can’t recover non-HD keys, making the encrypted wallet file essential.
Finding an old mnemonic in a college notebook confirmed which file held the 5 BTC, but the wallet remained encrypted until Claude’s intervention.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters pushed back on the “AI cracked it” framing: the real wins were finding the mnemonic notebook and locating the older backup file, not password guessing.
Claude Code’s file forensics use case is getting real traction; multiple commenters independently described using it to recover malformed SD card images and corrupted data, with similar fast results.
One commenter noted that rising crypto prices plus falling compute costs make brute-forcing old wallets increasingly worth it, and that even local LLMs can assist with this class of recovery work.
Notable Comments
@hasteg: “Claude ran a ctrl+f on his file system. Groundbreaking” – sharp skepticism that this required AI at all.
@vibe42: Notes KDF computation costs drop over time relative to BTC value, making old-wallet recovery a growing economic opportunity.
