Even though generative AI has been around for some time and we are aware of its limitations, it continues to surprise us on occasion. It turns out that it is now possible to use AI to ‘crack’ a password, as a Bitcoin investor is stating, who is amazed by what he has achieved. The artificial intelligence Claude managed to decipher his wallet password after 11 years, and he is now wealthy with the Bitcoin he held.
When text-based generative AI models like ChatGPT first emerged, there was a period where almost daily we saw news or people discussing the benefits of AI and showcasing new uses for it. During that time, we had cases like a person who deceived AI by saying his grandmother had passed away and that she would tell him Windows keys to fall asleep. This is how we realized that AI could be tricked into giving us functional Windows keys, though that latter part should be taken with a grain of salt.
Bitcoin Investor Recovers Wallet Password Lost 11 Years Ago Using AI Claude
Today’s case is more extreme, as we have a Bitcoin owner with 5 Bitcoin and a sad story. He changed his wallet password 11 years ago while under the influence of drugs and forgot it. Considering how much the price of Bitcoin has risen in over a decade, he could have a lot of money now and had spent years trying to remember it without success. At least until now, as he has managed to recover his password in a rather unusual way, by using AI Claude.
The AI did not provide him with the password on its own; that would have been practically impossible given the number of combinations. In fact, before successfully recovering it, he tried generating passwords with Claude and reportedly tested 3.5 trillion passwords, none of which worked. However, the key lay in a ‘mnemonic rule‘ he had saved on his university laptop with a file for his wallet. This was the key for the AI to obtain the password; otherwise, it would never have guessed it.
After Failing to Generate 3.5 Trillion Passwords, Decrypting a File Containing the Password Worked for Just $15
What the AI did to obtain the password was to decrypt the file it found on the laptop using the ‘btrecover‘ tool on the –dump-privkeys file, which determined his backup key. Here, he found a concatenation of sharedKey + password, and as soon as he checked it, he confirmed it was the password the user cprkn on X had been looking for after so many years.
If you’re curious about the password, it was ‘lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)‘, which might not have been what you expected for a BTC wallet. The AI itself tested it and managed to access the 5 Bitcoin, which originally cost him around $1,250 and are now worth close to $400,000. You might wonder about the cost of this operation, from password generation to the decryption process, but you’ll be surprised to learn it only cost $15. At the end of the task, it can be seen that he spent this money using a GPU rental service called Vast.ai.
An investor recovered $400,000 in Bitcoin with the AI Claude after losing his wallet password due to drug abuse 11 years ago.
