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A Bitcoin holder, identified on X as @cprkrn, recovered roughly 5 BTC—worth about $500,000—on May 13, 2026, using Anthropic’s Claude AI to unlock a wallet that had been inaccessible since around 2014 or 2015.
The wallet is tied to address 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6. According to @cprkrn, he changed the wallet password while in college and then forgot the new password. He still had an old mnemonic phrase, “lol420fu**thePOLICE!*:)”, but it no longer opened the wallet file he was trying to access.
Over the years, he spent about $250 on professional recovery attempts and tried what he described as “like 7 trillion passwords” before giving up on conventional methods. He later waited until bitcoin’s price crossed $100,000 to attempt recovery again, and by May 13, 2026, the market price had pulled back to the $80,000 to $82,000 range—still enough to justify further effort.
@cprkrn’s approach was to provide Claude with the full contents of his old college computer, including files, notebooks, and backups. Claude then located an older wallet file predating the password change and identified why the mnemonic no longer worked on the current wallet file.
The key technical issue involved btcrecover, an open-source bitcoin wallet recovery utility. The article says btcrecover was concatenating a shared key with the password in an incorrect order. Claude identified the bug, corrected the decryption logic, ran the process, and extracted private keys in Wallet Import Format.
The recovered keys matched the target address. In Claude’s output, as quoted in the X post, the user wrote: “PRIVATE KEYS DECRYPTED! WE GOT IT!!! THE 5 BTC IS YOURS!” A follow-up screenshot showed an imported legacy P2PKH wallet with the full 5 BTC balance and pending outbound transactions.
In a later post, @cprkrn summarized the method as a “last-ditch effort,” writing: “Just mega dump all of your computers and notebooks into Claude,” and adding, “Step 1. Download Claude. Step 2. Mega dump all of your information and pray.”
The X thread reportedly drew more than 414,000 views and approximately 1,900 likes within hours. Responses included comments from figures such as Nic Carter, Jesse Pollak, Laura Shin, and @bitcoinarchive. Some users described the outcome as a lifesaver, while others raised questions about the security implications of using AI systems with encrypted wallet files—though the recovery, as described, depended on the user already having the correct older password.
The wallet had last been publicly referenced by @cprkrn in August 2023, when he discussed the locked funds on the same address. The funds received on April 1, 2015, totaled 5 BTC and remained untouched until they were swept out the same day the recovery was completed.
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