Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude • Hacker News Board

giancarlostoro wrote: post #10

> 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 backup Man. 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.

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k.

Thank you MtGox.

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#14

Post by atonse » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

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.

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#15

Post by tucaz » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

notRobot wrote: post #2

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 ha…

I did EXACTLY that last night. Was doing by hand for about an hour and got to a point where I didn’t feel competent anymore and asked Claude to take from where I was.

5 minutes later I had almost 3 hours of important footage recovered.

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#16

Post by jackconsidine » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

> Their luck changed for the better when they found an old mnemonic seed phrase written in an old college notebook

TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#17

Post by andai » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #13

giancarlostoro wrote: post #10

> 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 backup Man. 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.

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k. Thank you MtGox.

Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#18

Post by stavros » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #17

stavros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k. Thank you MtGox.

Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?

It's something that locks your stuff so you can't access it for a while.

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#19

Post by Ccecil » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:28 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #17

stavros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k. Thank you MtGox.

Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?

It's sarcasm.

Everyone who had coin in Mt.Gox lost it during a hack. A portion of that was returned to the users who had a loss about a year ago.

Re: Bitcoin trader recovers wallet with help of Claude

#20

Post by spindump8930 » Thu, May 14, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #17

stavros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really thankful I put my bitcoin in a time vault back in 2012 or so. It was inaccessible until about last year, and my $10 is now worth $100k. Thank you MtGox.

Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?

Likely in this case the time vault was the collapse of Mt Gox, which has now recently been paying back holders.