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Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- notRobot 5mo agoClaude 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.
- arm32 5mo agoI'm sure data recovery companies are pretty pissed that slightly esoteric data recovery abilities are becoming more accessible for average software devs. They were charging an arm and a leg to remote in and run scripts.
- morpheuskafka 5mo agoThey still have two important moats: (1) expensive hardware tools (even stuff like SATA write blockers are kind of expensive for what they are), spare hard drive collections to swap failed PCBs, etc and (2) the "nobody got fired for hiring us" edge similar to how everyone calls in Crowdstrike/Mandiant after an incident. If a suit-level manager finds out customer data was lost, they are going to want to call in an expert so they can immediately tell the customer they did, not have the same internal team try to figure it out.
- kotaKat 5mo agoAs an aside to #1: The cool thing is in modern times the hardware tools have come down stupidly cheap in price. Even SD card recovery is (vaguely) in the right skilled hands in a pseudo-professional home lab these days. https://blog.acelab.eu.com/pc-3000-flash-spider-board-adapter-how-to-use-it.html https://blog.acelab.eu.com/pc-3000-flash-spider-board-adapte...
- michaelbuckbee 5mo agoI have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates". Claude's doing a tremendous job in getting him to grips with what is actually happening in the application, what's relevant, what's not, what's different. I think it's literally saving him days and days at work.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoI think it would be interesting, once the dust has settled, to do a compare with a less expensive model (time, capital, compute) such as deepseek 4.
- shimman 5mo agoAny reason to expect that this wouldn't work 100%? It's not like the different LLMs providers are that technically different from one another.
- locknitpicker 5mo ago> I have a friend that just picked up a new consulting job resurrecting an ancient Windows desktop application. No source control, no tests. And it's spread out over a dozen different folders with names like "_old", "_new" and "dates". That doesn't sound very impressive. Not being tracked with a version control system is fixed instantly with a git init, git add ., git commit .no AI required. Covering the app with tests is also something that requires no AI. At most, coding agents can generate characterization tests in broad sweeps, but we are talking about a delta between hand rolling and vibe-coding of a couple of days. Where LLM shines is helping developers build up an understanding of what is in place. Running /explain on a codebase can quickly provide you with a high level summary of what's in place.
- michaelbuckbee 5mo agoThe relevancy here is that he's denied the git history, versioning, branches, implicit documentation that even bad source control practices would have given him.
- tucaz 5mo agoI did EXACTLY that last night. Was doing by hand for about an hour and got to a point where I didn’t feel competent anymore and asked Claude to take from where I was. 5 minutes later I had almost 3 hours of important footage recovered.
- brunoborges 5mo ago> Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. A lot of "Claude Code is best at X" claims are probably user-selection bias. The people saying it are often exclusively Claude Code users, not people who are actively benchmarking Claude Code against Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and other agent harnesses on the same tasks. The claim may still be true for certain scenarios, but the evidence is usually anecdotal, not comparative.
- throwaway041207 5mo agoParent didn't say Claude Code is best at anything?
- gcr 5mo agoWhen I hear "claude code one-shotted X" and X is a novel problem, I mentally substituted "the agentic harness that I tried one-shotted X," since that's what they're saying. Getting any smart model to take a look at the task is the sort of lift that the speaker is usually pointing to.
- nananana9 5mo agoThe harness is pretty much irrelevant for general tasks. You can write a 100 line harness that only has one tool - try either "bash" or the more fun "you're running within nodejs, here's eval", you'd be surprised in how close to CC/Codex performance you're going to get.
- pojzon 5mo agoI did that, wrote my own harness “Jarvis”, simple loop. Still results were terrible using the same model in comparison to for example OpenCode. So X Doubt.
- gcr 5mo agoThere’s some weak evidence against this actually. Harness design makes a huge difference for tiny local models for example: https://itayinbarr.substack.com/p/honey-i-shrunk-the-coding-agent?triedRedirect=true https://itayinbarr.substack.com/p/honey-i-shrunk-the-coding-... I have only my own personal experience for frontier models, but I have seen different performance of Opus when used from Pi or Claude Code or Zed for example.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hasteg 5mo ago[flagged]
- altcognito 5mo ago> The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point. I know that we're all experts in archaic backup mechanisms and the encryption systems they used, but I think this qualifies as doing more than Ctrl+F Also, it is right there in the article.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- FlamingMoe 5mo agoWould be worth a lot more if he had done this sooner and put it in the market 5 or 6 years ago.
- nl3s 5mo agoBTC was valued at about $50k 5 years ago and about $10k 6 years ago. Now it is at about $80k. So I guess he might be glad he didn’t figure it out earlier.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago> 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.
- stavros 5mo agoI'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k. Thank you MtGox.
- andai 5mo agoNice, congrats. What's a time vault?
- stavros 5mo agoIt's something that locks your stuff so you can't access it for a while.
- Ccecil 5mo agoIt's sarcasm. Everyone who had coin in Mt.Gox lost it during a hack. A portion of that was returned to the users who had a loss about a year ago.
- baggachipz 5mo agoYeah my 100 stolen bitcoins got me a cool $4k check from the settlement. Definitely made whole by that :|
- stavros 5mo agoI think you would have been much better off choosing the bitcoin option. You'd have gotten around 40 BTC back, I think.
- vibe42 5mo agoMany 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.
- ndr 5mo agohow can that possibly work while supporting offline backup & restore?
- _ache_ 5mo agoThe compute power needed use to be of the order of 5s per password try. So it effectively mitigate brute force back them, you need a absurd compute power to crack them. Moore law did its thing, now you can do it with a lot less computer power.
- IIsi50MHz 4mo ago> Moore law did its thing, now you can do it with a lot less computer power. s/power/time/ maybe? Or on second thought: so energy-efficicient that it actually uses less power in the same-or-shorter time… which brings me back to "less compute power".
- jackconsidine 5mo ago> 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
- throwa356262 5mo agoPretty much every AI win story feels like this.
- bink 5mo agoThe guy also had to plug in an old hard drive for Claude to search. Sounds like he had an idea the wallet was on there to begin with.
- paxys 5mo agoI bet the majority of people reading this really think Claude cracked the encryption.
- john_strinlai 5mo agoi bet the majority of people reading this will reach the 1st line of the 2nd paragarph, and not think that claude cracked the encryption
- atonse 5mo agoI 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.
- nolok 5mo agoTo be fair regarding taxes it should be that you get all exemptions by default and the other side telling/justifying you why you don't qualify, instead of you not getting the things you should because you're not sure how to interpret the law or don't know this or that rule exists. Taxes shouldn't be that difficult, and the US version of it seems to be behind even the one I have here in europe (where my taxes are done "for me" for anything non business owner related). If the government is calculating your taxes anyway, they should just give the number to you instead of asking you a number and you better have the same as us or you're guilty of something. Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.
- simonh 5mo agoOr punishing to those that don’t pay for software and services to the companies that lobby for it to be this way.
- atonse 5mo agoI would agree with you on most situations (like 1040 personal income taxes especially). But in this particular tax credit, there's no way for the gov to know automatically what percentage of payroll was spent in qualified R&D expenses, since it's day to day business operations. Which is why we are _forced_ to hire an outside firm and pay them thousands of dollars (when Claude did an even better job), just to analyze how much of our time qualified as R&D expenses. The problem I have is that I am forced to have to find a firm to do this, and most firms won't even work with companies as small as ours. So then we're stuck and losing out on years of R&D tax credits at the moment, when I really don't need them anymore, to be honest.
- My_Name 5mo agoI 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...
- foobarian 5mo agoThink on the bright side, at least you didn't spend 10000 BTC to buy pizza... speaking of which, Bitcoin Pizza Day coming up in just over a week! https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-glossary/what-is-bitcoin-pizza https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-glossary/what-is-bitco...
- jmuguy 5mo agoMy wife doesn't like it when I tell the story of the hard drive I threw away with a wallet with 2 dozen BTC on it. But lets be honest - when BTC hit 100 bucks, we would have cashed it out thinking we were geniuses.
- throwaway041207 5mo agoYep, I timed the top of the market perfectly and cashed out 5 BTC at ~$80/BTC.
- fileeditview 5mo agoYou are better than me. Back when you could mine BTC with the CPU, i had about 2 coins. I found it useless and silly and deleted my wallet at some point :)
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoSame here. There are a ton of unspendable coins for that reason. For the record, they're still useless and silly, that just doesn't stop people from exchanging a nonsense amount of money for them.
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- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoSome more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136240
- ion098 5mo agoIs this not the link to this discussion?
- ZoneZealot 5mo agoGuessing the HN admins merged the post into this, which carries the comments.
- triyambakam 5mo agoHow did they convince Claude they hadn't stolen it?
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoMaybe they said they were gay?
- sillysaurusx 5mo ago(Relevant; there was a “gay jailbreak” thread a week or so ago. I laughed.)
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoHeh. I was going to let the context just float and see how many people tried to hide/kill it. Thus of course not realizing the actual irony in forcing away my comment that someone who didn’t know better might think was derogatory is exactly why a gay jailbreak exists.
- afrltp 5mo agoClaude 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 5mo ago"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. "
- plqbfbv 5mo ago> Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated- I guess the user simply pointed Claude Code at a local folder containing all the backups and files, and Code went through them via find/ls/etc
- NoHomoNoCry 5mo ago10 years ago a 500mb hard drive was not unheard of and he may not have maxed out his storage. Also, cloud storage is more prevalent now. I must admit this does sound a bit sensational.
- doublerabbit 5mo agoClaude hallucinate me a bitcoin address with unlimited money in it please.
- Alifatisk 5mo agoI'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 5mo agoOK, that's impressive
- hn937758 5mo agoI 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.
- kccqzy 5mo agoI did this a long time ago before the age of AI. Core dump and then run strings on it. Very low tech but very useful!
- mizzao 5mo agoHow do you use Claude Code to access your browser memory?
- hn937758 5mo agoI'd have to go back and look. It was 100% vibe coded.
- hn937758 4mo agoHere's what it did: https://pastebin.com/fFXRCJWs https://pastebin.com/fFXRCJWs The claude code session took several other failed attempts until I vibe coded it to this direction.
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoGuessing it gave JS to drop into console.
- ecommerceguy 5mo agoDoes Claude turn out to be what 'Quantum' was promised; crack bitcoin? This could be fun.
- tiffanyh 5mo agoI'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.
- bornfreddy 5mo agoThey didn't lose the key, they just didn't know which one is the correct one, where the lock is, and how the unlocking is done.
- kccqzy 5mo agoA wallet is just private keys of some specific public keys on the blockchain that have unspent output (UTXO). None of what’s described in this article involves the blockchain, only the storage and protection of the private keys on a local computer. You can imagine that in your example, you didn’t change the locks on a house, but rather you put the house keys in a secure lock box and you changed the locks on this box. Changing the locks on a house in this case means transferring from an old wallet to a new wallet and then abandoning the old wallet. That’s exactly what the OP is trying to do. It’s just that you need the original key to do it.
- glitchc 5mo agoThe wallet is akin to a lockbox holding your keys to the house. Breaking into the lockbox and changing it's lock does not affect the keys kept inside.
- VadimPR 5mo agoClaude is also surprisingly good at analyzing system issues on a Linux system and solving them!
- PeterStuer 5mo agoNot just Linux. Whiz at system management on Windows as well.
- internet101010 5mo agoYeah Claude is really, really good there. You tell it the distro and the problem and it will solve it. Saved me a lot of pain when it came to swapping out an encrypted boot drive and was good about emphasizing the order of operations required for what I would consider a higher risk/complexity situation.
- moduspol 5mo agoYesterday I had ChatGPT walk me through fixing my single-node k3s cluster. It required rebuilding the sqlite database (while skipping a few corrupted records), then clearing the containerd cache, and then finally deleting a somehow-corrupted Secret record, and then recreating it. Without it I would have given up way earlier, but the infinite patience to keep slurping in error messages and continue to troubleshoot really worked out.
- rollyboo 5mo agoFeels less like "ai cracked crypto" and more like having an insanely patient technical friend sitting next to you for 12 hours doing digital archaeology.
- hiroto_lemon 5mo ago[flagged]
- sillysaurusx 5mo agoThere’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 5mo agoi am not understanding why could'nt a deterministic dictionary program do it?
- fontain 5mo agoThe story is confusing some people. Claude found a file on the computer that the wallet owner had not found. Claude didn't crack a password or do anything magic, it just searched for a file that the wallet owner had not thought to search for before. So, where the wallet owner had previously only tried to access /Users/example/wallet.dat, Claude thought, "why don't I check if there is another wallet.dat file elsewhere on the system?" which it did. The outcome is the same, it is great that Claude tried something that the wallet owner hadn't tried, but this is more an example of how dumb humans can be rather than how smart Claude is. The trillions of passwords are a red herring and unrelated to the solve.
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- oxqbldpxo 5mo agoThis sounds like an Ad, why would you tell the world about this? Too coincidential.
- htx80nerd 5mo agoclaude ads hot off the presses.
- enraged_camel 5mo agoThe amount of pure conspiratorial thinking will never cease to amaze me.
- flakiness 5mo ago[dead]
- hansmayer 5mo agoOn a purely technical level - cool. But I still cannot get over the impression that even in this case LLMs show us how they are mainly useful to grifters. I mean, 5 Bitcoins worth 400K USD. Why? What intrinsic value does Bitcoin deliver? It's like trading for monopoly money.
- nothrowaways 5mo agoToo many claude ads on this website
- j3s 5mo agoblatant ad on the frontpage again
- dnnddidiej 5mo agoLol great intersection of AI, Crypto and blind luck. By getting stoned he was forced to hold until AI could solve his problem at a crypto high.
- emsign 5mo agoAnd next to this article are two article recommendations: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...> Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-code-deletes-developers-production-setup-including-its-database-and-snapshots-2-5-years-of-records-were-nuked-in-an-instant https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...>
- tracker1 5mo agoKind of cool to hear... I had a couple computers running miners at home towards the end of my second marriage (which ended in 2010-2011), and after I had a few coins when realizing I couldn't actually spend them (IIRC $0.25 at the time), I just deleted the wallets. I had no foresight or faith that they'd be worth around $100k each in 15 years. I'm curious how many did the same, how many coins out there were just deleted altogether.
- chasd00 5mo agoi distinctly remember a coworker many years ago offering to just give me like 10 bitcoin to see them and how it worked. i said "no, thanks". granted, hindsight is 20/20
- phil21 5mo agoI might have been your co-worker. I went from giving them away to anyone in the office who asked (very very few), to selling them for under market when they were in the $10-50 range. Only three people took me up on the offer then, and they bought moderately life changing amounts I've later been thanked for. Such as a down payment for someone's first home after he got married. Luckily they held onto enough of their coins to make a meaningful difference in their lives like I preached about at the time. The number of folks who ping me at various BTCH ATH hitting the news is expressing regret and laughing about it is... a lot! It was strange being the "Weirdo Bitcoin guy" for a time. Then you started hearing about it in the mainstream news/etc. and it got even stranger to me. I did quite well for myself, but of course wish I could go back in time and actually go balls to the wall on my early mining operation. I thought I was being irresponsible enough as it were - maxing out my rental townhouse's electric service with a rack of GPU miners in my basement, and some sketchy DIY electrical work to make it all happen. Unfortunate to me cryptocurrency devolved into such a horrible place with the shitcoins, etc. I dropped out from the scene fairly early since I was a True Believer and became quite disenchanted with the whole thing. All I was there for was "digital p2p cash" - I never once foresaw it as a major store of value.
- yapyap 5mo ago“ Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data.” … this dweeb had a file containing their seed in their backup, claude just searched through the files
- jiscariot 5mo agoStill, they didn’t give up because that wallet contained 5 BTC; this may not sound much, but it has a value of almost $400,000. They are really underestimating their audiance here.
- wahnfrieden 5mo agoThey are not though, because this audience is apparently eager to gobble up fake clickbait.
- luxuryballs 5mo agoSo you’re telling me he used a computer to search all the files and found the old backup? computer file systems are truly proving to be revolutionary technology!
- zahlman 5mo ago> bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup > After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point. So it switched from brute-force searching passwords against a file, to brute-force searching files against a password?
- wahnfrieden 5mo agothis is fake clickbait.
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- kristjansson 5mo agoOne can't help but observe the contrast between counterparty behavior here vs. the crypto boom. A counterparty service had a secret worth 400K in-hand and just passed it back to the user. Meanwhile crypto worries about MEV, the Dark Forest, etc. This cycle is hostile in lots of ways, but the trustworthiness and absence of hostility in this dimension is quite nice.
- joshspankit 5mo agoAnthropic has the private key now too edit: Personally I don’t think they would take advantage of it, but still worth moving the BTC asap
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