Owner of $400,000 in bitcoin was locked out of their account a decade ago and they just used Claude to get back in

4 weeks ago 8

Gold Bitcoins are seen in the window of a Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchange office on November 08, 2024 in Istanbul, Turkey. Bitcoin has soared to new record highs nearing 77,000 in the days after Donald Trump's re-election and on his campaign promise to support Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency market.

You may think getting locked out of your account because you've forgotten the password is annoying, but have you ever gotten locked out and lost almost half a million dollars in the process? That's what happened to X user @cprkrn, when they stored five bitcoin ($402k at the time of writing) in an account in 2015 and forgot how to get back in.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, cprkrn used Anthropic's AI model, Claude, to get access again. After using 'like 7 trillion passwords ', they found a password that happened to be the one before the current one.

This computer had a mnemonic device that they seemingly didn't spot, and Claude put that together with the rest of their account details to get into the account. The LLM didn't hack into the account, or anything so elaborate, it just found the pieces to get into the account, lost in an old computer.

If you're wondering how and why they lost their password for an account that is so valuable, they were apparently "Locked out 11+ years because I got stoned and changed the password."

I tried like 7 trillion passwords lmfaoFound this old pneumonic a few weeks ago that ended up being the old password before I changed itThought I was screwedLast ditch effort dumped my whole college computer into ClaudeIt found an OLD wallet file that the pneumonic…May 13, 2026

There's an ironic silver lining here, in that we don't know if cprkm would have held onto the bitcoin so long if they hadn't lost access. According to the account history, 5 bitcoin were purchased on April Fools' Day in 2015. By this point, the cryptocurrency was worth around $245. Now, one bitcoin fetches $60,000. That's a fair jump in value, though it is down from its peak of $90,000 in October, 2025.

Still, cprkrn would have been aware that they had somewhere close to half a million dollars in a locked account for years now. They report that dumping their computer into Claude was their 'last ditch effort' to get the account back.

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You may be wondering what they plan on doing with all that cash now that they finally have it back. Their answer? Asking electronic artist and DJ Deadmau5 to play at their wedding. I suppose there are technically worse ways to spend the money.

James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.

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