Josh Alex
101.7K posts
A guy spent 11 years trying to crack his own Bitcoin wallet password. He tried 7 TRILLION combinations. Claude solved it by finding a file he forgot he had. > Around 2014 he bought Bitcoin at $250 per coin while in college. > Worried about security, he changed his wallet password while intoxicated to: lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:) > He forgot it. The Bitcoin sat locked while the price went from $250 to over $80,000. > For years he tried to crack it. He spent $250 on professional recovery services. He ran btcrecover on his CPU for 34 BILLION attempts. Nothing. > He rented an RTX 4090 GPU on Vast ai for $15 and ran Hashcat at 148 MILLION attempts per second. 3.4 TRILLION more passwords. Brute force, pattern, gap phase. Still nothing. > The total attempts crossed 7 TRILLION combinations across years of trying. > Then he tried something different. He uploaded the entire contents of his old college hard drive into Claude. > Claude found a wallet backup file from December 2019 that he had completely forgotten existed. > It also caught a bug in btcrecover. The tool had been concatenating the password incorrectly the entire time. > Bitcoin private keys never change. Only the encryption around them does. The 2019 backup used an older password he still had written down in a college notebook. > Claude ran the correct decryption, verified the addresses and swept the wallet. > 5 Bitcoin. $398,000. Unlocked. > His post ended with: "NAMING MY KID AFTER YOU @AnthropicAI" The wallet was never unbreakable. The information needed to open it had been sitting on the same hard drive for 11 years. No human was ever going to find it. Claude did in one session.
