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  atonse
  I have a similar claude story (much less money though), with the IRS R&D tax credit. The auditing firm initially said we qualify for $0. But then I had claude analyze past R&D reports and our expenses and it found the problem. The auditor had miscategorized our company.So claude drafted an email even pointing to the right Internal Revenue Code (IRS Law), and specify why we fall under a specific category. The auditor got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself).So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.
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  notRobot
  Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. The other day I tried to recover some images from an SD card that had gone bad. I used GetDataBack to recover files, but they appeared to be malformed and didn't open in image viewers.I tasked Claude to analyze the files and figure out what's going on, and eventually we figured out that each file had a custom metadata header + thumbnail + actual image concatenated. I had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself.I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying different approaches.
• kristjansson
  One can't help but observe the contrast between counterparty behavior here vs. the crypto boom. A counterparty service had a secret worth 400K in-hand and just passed it back to the user. Meanwhile crypto worries about MEV, the Dark Forest, etc.This cycle is hostile in lots of ways, but the trustworthiness and absence of hostility in this dimension is quite nice.
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  jackconsidine
  > Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebookTBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude
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  giancarlostoro
  > Bitcoin trader recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago — bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backupMan. I wish I had a lost wallet worth a quarter of that even, technically didn't need Claude for this, just needed any password cracking software.
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  hn937758
  I was making a long edit in a crappy wiki UI and my browser froze. It would have taken a long time to redo, hours.I didn't want to take the chance of force closing and losing everything. I used claude code to extract my text out of the browser internals and filesystem objects.
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  jiscariot
  Still, they didn’t give up because that wallet contained 5 BTC; this may not sound much, but it has a value of almost $400,000.They are really underestimating their audiance here.
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  vibe42
  Many crypto wallets use a key derivation function (KDF) to add an amount of computation (and memory usage) per password tried - to mitigate brute force of weak passwords.The increase in compute (decrease in brute-force cost) combined with price increases in many crypto tokens means brute-forcing old wallets can become worth it years after passwords were forgotten.And of course even smaller, local AI models can now easily write optimized scripts to brute-force any given KDF function.
• anon
  undefined
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  tiffanyh
  I'm no expert but using an old wallet with a changed password, and it working, seems like a major security design flaw.In the physical world, I can't imagine too many people being happy that old keys to your house still work even after you've changed the locks.Can someone more informed, help me understand how this worked and why it's ok.I'm genuinely wanting to become more informed & better understand.
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  oxqbldpxo
  This sounds like an Ad, why would you tell the world about this? Too coincidential.
• dnnddidiej
  Lol great intersection of AI, Crypto and blind luck.By getting stoned he was forced to hold until AI could solve his problem at a crypto high.
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  tracker1
  Kind of cool to hear... I had a couple computers running miners at home towards the end of my second marriage (which ended in 2010-2011), and after I had a few coins when realizing I couldn't actually spend them (IIRC $0.25 at the time), I just deleted the wallets. I had no foresight or faith that they'd be worth around $100k each in 15 years. I'm curious how many did the same, how many coins out there were just deleted altogether.
• sillysaurusx
  There’s an interesting ethical question here.The other day, I asked Claude to track down the leaked Claude Code source so I could study it. It refused, saying “given who made me, I’ll pass.” It gave me some pointers on how to find it myself, which worked.There isn’t that much of a difference between “help me crack this bitcoin wallet” and “help me crack this executable.”I don’t exactly have a solid point, just some general observations. First, I think we’ll see AI more and more simply refuse to do any kind of forensics, as forensics becomes more powerful. Second, that implies local models will become more valuable, since they’re the only ones willing to do that kind of work.I once got myself banned from Claude by researching barbiturates, since they’re connected with suicide. So my third observation is that we’ll see an uptick in people getting punished for trying to do things with AI that people don’t usually do. (Luckily the unban form worked.)Someone downthread asked “how’d he convince Claude the coins weren’t stolen?” Which is an interesting question, because presumably some people trying to crack a wallet have stolen it. So I guess the fourth observation is that the exact framing you approach an AI with will become more important. There was the classic “do this or I’ll cut off my arm,” which worked a year ago. But in the future it will be more like “hopefully the AI believes my story, or else I’ll get into trouble.”It’s good there are multiple AI vendors, or else it’d get real dystopian real fast when the de facto AI’s policy becomes something you have no way of working around.
• nothrowaways
  Too many claude ads on this website
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  My_Name
  I spent a couple of days mining many years ago and got 2 bitcoins. At the time, they weren't worth the electricity they cost to mine and over time I lost the wallet and all information related to it.I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...
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  rollyboo
  Feels less like "ai cracked crypto" and more like having an insanely patient technical friend sitting next to you for 12 hours doing digital archaeology.
• fontain
  The story is confusing some people.Claude found a file on the computer that the wallet owner had not found. Claude didn't crack a password or do anything magic, it just searched for a file that the wallet owner had not thought to search for before.So, where the wallet owner had previously only tried to access /Users/example/wallet.dat, Claude thought, "why don't I check if there is another wallet.dat file elsewhere on the system?" which it did.The outcome is the same, it is great that Claude tried something that the wallet owner hadn't tried, but this is more an example of how dumb humans can be rather than how smart Claude is.The trillions of passwords are a red herring and unrelated to the solve.
• zahlman
  > bot tried 3.5 trillion passwords before decrypting an old wallet backup> After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point.So it switched from brute-force searching passwords against a file, to brute-force searching files against a password?
• anon
  undefined
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  VadimPR
  Claude is also surprisingly good at analyzing system issues on a Linux system and solving them!
• ecommerceguy
  Does Claude turn out to be what 'Quantum' was promised; crack bitcoin? This could be fun.
• anon
  undefined
• afrltp
  Claude found an old wallet and then ran btcrecover on that. The question is why the user could not find an old wallet with any numbers of Unix tools himself.Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.
• luxuryballs
  So you’re telling me he used a computer to search all the files and found the old backup? computer file systems are truly proving to be revolutionary technology!
• yapyap
  “ Out of frustration, cprkrn then dumped their whole college computer into Claude. This was when the AI discovered an older backup file of the wallet from December 2019 hidden in cprkrn's data.”… this dweeb had a file containing their seed in their backup, claude just searched through the files
• hansmayer
  On a purely technical level - cool. But I still cannot get over the impression that even in this case LLMs show us how they are mainly useful to grifters. I mean, 5 Bitcoins worth 400K USD. Why? What intrinsic value does Bitcoin deliver? It's like trading for monopoly money.
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  hasteg
  Claude ran a ctrl+f on his file system. Groundbreaking. Insane the dude hadn't figured this out for himself considering a few years salary was just sitting there.
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  TruffleLabs
  "the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort."Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated-Via Claude "So the chat upload file size limit is actually 500MB per file (not 30MB as many third-party sources claim - those appear to be outdated). The 20-file-per-chat cap and the 30MB-per-file limit in Projects remain consistent across plans. The real constraint at any subscription level remains the context window - how many tokens Claude can hold in memory at once during a conversation. "
• emsign
  And next to this article are two article recommendations:Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...>Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...>
• wahnfrieden
  this is fake clickbait.
• j3s
  blatant ad on the frontpage again
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  triyambakam
  How did they convince Claude they hadn't stolen it?
• morpheos137
  i am not understanding why could'nt a deterministic dictionary program do it?
• doublerabbit
  Claude hallucinate me a bitcoin address with unlimited money in it please.
• josefritzishere
  OK, that's impressive
• dshaqra
  [flagged]
• tommy29tmar
  [flagged]
• aayushkumar121
  [dead]
• hiroto_lemon
  [flagged]
• anon
  undefined
• flakiness
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  ChrisArchitect
  Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136240
• Alifatisk
  I've tried Claude Code with another LLM, it's very good at doing tasks and figuring things out. So this made me wonder, even though we know how good Claude models is, maybe the true value is in the harness now?