In one crazy evening, a bitcoin owner changed the password of his crypto wallet. When he sobered up, he was mortified to learn he no longer remembered what that password was. His five bitcoins were lost forever, until recently.

That was a decade ago, during a time when bitcoin prices were around 200-300USD. Of course, history would tell us the following years the value of bitcoin would increase significantly. By then, of course this user who has five bitcoins tucked away in a wallet, would try everything in his power to retrieve it.

Crypto enthusiasts would say the best place to keep crypto would be in cold wallets. Wallets of this time were quite different. It wasn’t a simple “forget password” type of thing. In any case, the users used a tool to brute force the wallet, and even after over a trillion attempts, access remained barred.

The user took all his files inside an old college computer and uploaded them on Claude, where the AI managed to sort through the chaos. It discovered an older password from before the time the user changed the password. This old password worked and the user retrieved his five bitcoins, which almost hits $400,000 as of this writing.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is, if you have a device, smartphone, laptop, flashdrive, HDD, whatnot. Probably keep them somewhere safe. You never know when one of these might have something important you need even ten years from now. (That was a joke, by the way.)

It should be stressed that Claude did not hack the wallet and decrypted it. The user’s old files were stored in an old, college computer, and all this information was fed to Claude to organize and decipher, finding the old password and any bugs.

This wasn’t the first time someone has managed to successfully retrieve their bitcoin.

There was this guy who bought bitcoin in 2009 for a small sum of $22. He forgot all about it until in 2013, where he remembered his password and made a small fortune with it. Hopefully he kept a little bit and cashed out recently.

And then of course there is this tragedy, where a man had accidentally thrown away the hard drive that contained the private keys to his thousands of bitcoin, which amounted to about 200 million. It’s been 13 years between throwing away his drive and going after it. He even considered buying the entire landfill that would allow him to properly excavate the area, but his attempts thus far have been unsuccessful.