71–80 of 195 posts
> 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
> 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.
Then I was especially tempted years later after running into the MtGox booth at CES, and seeing how convenient it had become. I remember asking a guy at the booth if Satoshi was really still anonymous or if any insiders knew about him, and he said "no" but was bit surprised I knew about Satoshi. I guess Bitcoin was still quite niche then even amongst a technical crowd.
I considered buying a few bucks worth of bitcoin then for lulz, but I thought that money was better spent on beer lol.
I've never really regretted spending that money on beer rather than bitcoin, because I knew that even if I did, it would 100% have been on MtGox and I would have lost it in the hack anyway, which would have been even more bitterly frustrating.
A few of pints of beer >> years of regret.
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.
How do you use Claude Code to access your browser memory?
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…
> Claude Code is really good at stuff like this. A lot of "Claude Code is best at X" claims are probably user-selection bias. The people saying it are often exclusively Claude Code users, not people who are actively benchmarking Claude Code against Gemini CLI, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, and other agent harnesses on the same tasks. The claim may still be true for certain scenarios, but the evidence is usually anecd…
Getting any smart model to take a look at the task is the sort of lift that the speaker is usually pointing to.
Claude is also surprisingly good at analyzing system issues on a Linux system and solving them!
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.
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...
you can!... but they wouldn't be worth the electricity now either. the cost of mining (amortization of hardware costs plus electricty) is the value of bitcoin. if bitcoins are a bargain to mine, more people will mine them thereby reducing rewards.
should you have mined more back then if you had magical perfect knowledge of the future? no: they weren't worth the electricity.
instead you should have bought more of them back then.
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…
> So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially. This is no joke; for better or worse, I see a day when I'm paying a lot more for this and it will be a bargain.