Offbeat
Dude… where’s my password? Claude reunites forgetful stoner with $400k Bitcoin stash
AI to the rescue as 11-year search for password turns up in old PC files
Eleven years ago, a stoner bought some Bitcoin, lit up, and entered a password that he soon forgot. Now, after searching for more than a decade, Claude AI has helped him figure out the credentials he needed to gain access to a crypto wallet containing currency that is now worth a whopping $400,000.
The man, who retains an anonymous online profile only going by the alias “cprkrn,” vowed to name his progeny after Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, all because the AI tool helped him regain access to an Obama-era wallet he thought was impenetrable.
Armed only with an old mnemonic phrase, the man plugged it into Claude and told the AI to search his computer for ways he could use it to figure out the password that could regain access to the 5 Bitcoins he bought in 2015 at a Starbucks.
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He told web show MTSlive that he had two of the three passwords needed to open up the wallet, but couldn’t find the crucial third after changing it, and naturally later forgetting it, while he was high.
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He said he bought the tokens when the price for each was around $250. Altogether, his Bitcoin stash is now worth just shy of $400,000.
After eight weeks working to crack the password, and after the man gave it access to his old computer used for college work, Claude found a wallet backup that the mnemonic phrase was able to decrypt.
According to an overview of the mission, written by Claude, accessing the wallet backup gave the man access to the private keys required to access the Blockchain.com wallet.
Looking at the wallet’s transaction history shows the funds lying dormant since April 2015, and then being transferred out on Wednesday.
Previous attempts to regain access to the wallet involved brute forcing password strings, 3.5 trillion of them by Claude’s reckoning, all to no avail.
He even traveled back to his parents’ house to retrieve college notebooks, manually entering "anything that looked like password or a seed phrase" he thought might help the AI crack or find the third password.
The man ran Claude for eight weeks to realise he changed the password 11 years ago, while stoned, to “lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)”.
This is a stellar case study to highlight the value of complex passwords, if there ever was one. ®