200
Claude helps man recover $400,000 in BTC 11 years after he got high and forgot password
(www.dexerto.com)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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"However, the breakthrough reportedly came when he uploaded files from his old college computer into Claude.
Rather than simply guessing the password, Claude helped dig through the old files and identify an older wallet.dat file that appeared to predate the password change. The user also reportedly had an old mnemonic phrase, which helped unlock the wallet once the correct file was found."
Yeah, I saw that but I was trying to get more detail. None of that makes sense to me. Why did a wallet.dat file help? How did the mnemonic phrase help? I literally have zero context for crypto.
Well, in crypto all your assets are on the blockchain. But you can access them using wallet software. You can have multiple addresses that have a balance, and most of the time anyone can see those balances, as the ledger is synchronized and transactions are checked by all clients.
However, in order to access and send the money, you will need proof that you are the owner. Therefore every address has a keypair. In older desktop clients, there was a local file called wallet.dat which stored all of the owned wallet addresses and their private keys. That file could optionally be encrypted. Newer clients often use a mnemonic phrase and derive all keys for the addresses based on that single phrase, but the person in question still had the original wallet.dat, even unencrypted, meaning he could access the keys all along. Not sure what the mnemonic had to do with it. Perhaps that belonged to a newer wallet where he imported the old addresses into.
Apparently an old file had his previous password in plaintext... The AI just searched through a ton of files and found it, I guess.
The llm found the file that was encrypted with an older password that the guy could remember. The llm didnt decrypt anything or find a vulnrability, it just found an older fill the guy could unlock and he gained access to his bitcoin wallet that way.
ELI5: The guy thought he'd lost his keys, but had a spare in another jacket all along
Ohhhhhh