Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

notRobot

Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. The other day I tried to recover some images from an SD card that had gone bad. I used GetDataBack to recover files, but they appeared to be malformed and didn't open in image viewers. I tasked Claude to analyze the files and figure out what's going on, and eventually we figured out that each file had a custom metadata header + thumbnail + actual image concatenated. I had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself. I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying different approaches.

vibe42

Many crypto wallets use a key derivation function (KDF) to add an amount of computation (and memory usage) per password tried - to mitigate brute force of weak passwords. The increase in compute (decrease in brute-force cost) combined with price increases in many crypto tokens means brute-forcing old wallets can become worth it years after passwords were forgotten. And of course even smaller, local AI models can now easily write optimized scripts to brute-force any given KDF function.

giancarlostoro

> Bitcoin trader recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago — bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup Man. I wish I had a lost wallet worth a quarter of that even, technically didn't need Claude for this, just needed any password cracking software.

atonse

I have a similar claude story (much less money though), with the IRS R&D tax credit. The auditing firm initially said we qualify for $0. But then I had claude analyze past R&D reports and our expenses and it found the problem. The auditor had miscategorized our company. So claude drafted an email even pointing to the right Internal Revenue Code (IRS Law), and specify why we fall under a specific category. The auditor got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself). So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.

jackconsidine

> Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude

My_Name

I spent a couple of days mining many years ago and got 2 bitcoins. At the time, they weren't worth the electricity they cost to mine and over time I lost the wallet and all information related to it. I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...

ChrisArchitect

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136240

triyambakam

How did they convince Claude they hadn't stolen it?

afrltp

Claude found an old wallet and then ran btcrecover on that. The question is why the user could not find an old wallet with any numbers of Unix tools himself. Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.

TruffleLabs

"the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort." Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated- Via Claude "So the chat upload file size limit is actually 500MB per file (not 30MB as many third-party sources claim - those appear to be outdated). The 20-file-per-chat cap and the 30MB-per-file limit in Projects remain consistent across plans. The real constraint at any subscription level remains the context window - how many tokens Claude can hold in memory at once during a conversation. "

doublerabbit

Claude hallucinate me a bitcoin address with unlimited money in it please.

Alifatisk

I've tried Claude Code with another LLM, it's very good at doing tasks and figuring things out. So this made me wonder, even though we know how good Claude models is, maybe the true value is in the harness now?

josefritzishere

OK, that's impressive

hn937758

I was making a long edit in a crappy wiki UI and my browser froze. It would have taken a long time to redo, hours. I didn't want to take the chance of force closing and losing everything. I used claude code to extract my text out of the browser internals and filesystem objects.

ecommerceguy

Does Claude turn out to be what 'Quantum' was promised; crack bitcoin? This could be fun.

tiffanyh

I'm no expert but using an old wallet with a changed password, and it working, seems like a major security design flaw. In the physical world, I can't imagine too many people being happy that old keys to your house still work even after you've changed the locks. Can someone more informed, help me understand how this worked and why it's ok. I'm genuinely wanting to become more informed & better understand.

VadimPR

Claude is also surprisingly good at analyzing system issues on a Linux system and solving them!

rollyboo

Feels less like "ai cracked crypto" and more like having an insanely patient technical friend sitting next to you for 12 hours doing digital archaeology.

sillysaurusx

There’s an interesting ethical question here. The other day, I asked Claude to track down the leaked Claude Code source so I could study it. It refused, saying “given who made me, I’ll pass.” It gave me some pointers on how to find it myself, which worked. There isn’t that much of a difference between “help me crack this bitcoin wallet” and “help me crack this executable.” I don’t exactly have a solid point, just some general observations. First, I think we’ll see AI more and more simply refuse to do any kind of forensics, as forensics becomes more powerful. Second, that implies local models will become more valuable, since they’re the only ones willing to do that kind of work. I once got myself banned from Claude by researching barbiturates, since they’re connected with suicide. So my third observation is that we’ll see an uptick in people getting punished for trying to do things with AI that people don’t usually do. (Luckily the unban form worked.) Someone downthread asked “how’d he convince Claude the coins weren’t stolen?” Which is an interesting question, because presumably some people trying to crack a wallet have stolen it. So I guess the fourth observation is that the exact framing you approach an AI with will become more important. There was the classic “do this or I’ll cut off my arm,” which worked a year ago. But in the future it will be more like “hopefully the AI believes my story, or else I’ll get into trouble.” It’s good there are multiple AI vendors, or else it’d get real dystopian real fast when the de facto AI’s policy becomes something you have no way of working around.

morpheos137

i am not understanding why could'nt a deterministic dictionary program do it?