User Recovers 5 BTC Wallet Lost 11 Years via Claude AI

A pseudonymous X user known as cprkrn announced on May 13, 2026, that he had regained access to a Bitcoin wallet holding about 5 BTC, now valued at roughly $400,000, which had remained dormant for 11 years after he forgot a password he changed while intoxicated.

Blockchain data confirms the wallet, address 14VJySbsKraEJbtwk9ivnr1fXs6QuofuE6 on Blockchain.com, saw no activity since April 2015 until five transactions moved the funds that day to a new address associated with Hyperunit, a hot wallet service. Cprkrn purchased the bitcoin in his college years for between $200 and $300 when prices hovered around $250 per coin.

According to cprkrn's detailed X thread, which amassed millions of views, he had repeatedly attempted recovery over the years using tools like the open-source btcrecover software. Those efforts included testing more than 3.5 trillion password combinations, at times with assistance from Hashcat and Python scripts, but yielded no success. He also spent around $250 on specialized recovery tools.

The breakthrough came last week when cprkrn uploaded over 1 gigabyte of data from two old Mac computers, two external hard drives, Apple Notes exports, iCloud Mail archives,...