May 18, 2026
For five years, the wallet mocked them. As Bitcoin prices soared and the news about those gains were everywhere, they could only stare at the screen in frustration, knowing they had five of the sought-after tokens, but no way to access them. It was the ultimate hodl, or "Hold On For Dear Life" — a short hand for a long-term buy and hold strategy.
The user, who goes by the X handle @cprkrn, but has hidden their real name, had lost the password to the wallet sometime around 2014 after changing it one day when they were (in their own words) "stoned" (1). Unable to touch the account, those five Bitcoin grew to a value of almost $400,000. (cprkrn originally paid just $245 for the cryptocurrency.)
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Then, days ago, Anthropic's Claude proved to be a savior and benefactor to cprkrn, cracking the password for the account and giving them access (2) to all of the fortunes within.
A long road
It's not like cprkrn hadn't tried to access the wallet in the time since they forgot their new password. They had done a brute force assault and even worked with professional recovery services. Nothing worked.
As a last-ditch effort, they uploaded their entire college computer, which held the wallet, onto Anthropic's Claude AI to let it investigate. The AI found an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data that contained the password. It also spotted an issue with the open-source btcrecover recovery tool (which cprkrn has been using to try to crack the wallet) that was causing problems. Once that was ironed out, Claude got to work.
It ultimately, took 3.5 trillion tries, but eventually cprkrn, the bot and the AI were able to gain access – and cprkrn was able to transfer the lost Bitcoin to their current wallet.
The missing password, by the way? "lol420fuckthePOLICE" (3)!:)*
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Going long
cprkrn admits that losing the password was likely the best thing that could have happened to them, noting that if they had retained access, they would have blown the money long ago (something they say won't happen now).
"I would've fumbled them / bought shitcoins or something I was definitely not responsible enough," they wrote (4). "[This is] Probably [the] perfect timing to get them back."
While many people would take the immediate payout from such a windfall, cprkrn indicated they may not. In follow-up comments on social media, they continued to be bullish on Bitcoin, but said as far as being the focus of the Internet's spotlight, once was enough.
"Ok I never wanna go viral again but this was actually the best day of my life," they wrote (5). "I have talked about this story for so many years with so many friends and never thought I'd see the day this wallet is opened. Cheers y'all. See you @ $250k."
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Chris Morris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience at many of the internet's biggest news outlets. In addition to his activities as a writer, reporter and editor, Chris is also a frequent panel moderator and speaker at major conferences, including CES and South by Southwest.
