[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 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.

[ApolloFortyNine]

Explaining your life to an llm, then having it generate permutations of passwords to try does sound like it would work a decent percentage of the time.

A large percentage of passwords aren't a random string of characters but a memorable word + memorable number. There's existing projects that basically do the same, and 3.5 trillion doesn't really make it clear if one of those wouldn't have worked as well, but I can see it having an above random chance to guess a password.

[nonethewiser]

>Explaining your life to an llm, then having it generate permutations of passwords to try does sound like it would work a decent percentage of the time.

I cannot relate to this at all. This information doesn't really seem that helpful. What might the strategy look like? Including spouses names or other proper nouns associated with you. But it's going to be a massive brute force effort still, and the likelyhood of a targeted crack that performs significantly better than more naive brute force passwords seems so unlikely.

Are your passwords like "SPOUSE_NAME:HOMETOWN_NAME"? Even if so there are probably more people with dictionary words that can be brute forced faster. IT would have to be the case that more people use patterns like that compared to something a regular dictionary attack could crack.

[ApolloFortyNine]

The amount of times I've gotten told a password and it contains birth year or anniversary year, maybe child birth year, is insane. I'd say 9 times out of 10 it's that or a dictionary word.

[nilamo]

The idea that someone (the NSA?) is training models on all of our collected info, and using that to predict all of our hidden information, is horrifying.

The best time to start using a password manager was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.

[chromadon]

If any authority wants your data, a password isn't whats stopping them.

[m4rtink]

So the remotely running AI now can guess many of your past and possibly future passwords when somone else promps it to ? Seems handy!

[stavros]

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.

[keeda]

Way back in the day when Bitcoin first came about, I once idly contemplated spending some time and money on it just because it was a very cool technology. At the time it was a bit of a hassle because you had to mine your own.

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.

[bavell]

> MtGox

Whew, that brings me back!

I still think about the Bitcoin my buddy paid me for his half of a pizza ~15 years ago... worth 6 figures now haha.

[matheusmoreira]

I have a cousin who received around 2 BTC after playing some cards with some people. Wasn't worth much at the time. He sold the coins immediately.

Better not to dwell on such things.

[unshavedyak]

Yup. I was really close to buying $1000 (at $1) worth of BTC ages ago. I don't dwell because the stress of managing that through time would have eaten me away lol.

With that said, i do regret not at least mining/etc. Back then i could have mined in many ways, and getting into it as a hobby probably would have meant holding larger amounts of BTC in the long run.

[zahlman]

I remember thinking about buying $100 (at $10). And then realizing I didn't actually know how to do it and didn't feel like looking it up or going through whatever steps to do that kind of transaction online, or worrying about getting scammed....

[echelon_musk]

A friend lost £2000 worth of BTC in MtGox which is probably worth a fortune at today's prices. The last time I spoke with him he said there was some sort of lawsuit for victim compensation. How did you recover your funds?

[stavros]

They emailed us during the course of the lawsuit, I followed the instructions and they sent me maybe half my BTC in the end.

[andai]

Nice, congrats. What's a time vault?

[Ccecil]

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.

[baggachipz]

Yeah my 100 stolen bitcoins got me a cool $4k check from the settlement. Definitely made whole by that :|

[stavros]

I think you would have been much better off choosing the bitcoin option. You'd have gotten around 40 BTC back, I think.

[baggachipz]

I don't believe I had the option. I just filed my claim, and several years later a check showed up.

[spindump8930]

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

[stavros]

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

[WarmWash]

I had a high school friend that died about 10 years ago from an over dose. He was always tech forward and had talked in the past about getting drugs from the dark web to sell locally.

I wasn't particularly close with him after high school, but he was an only child, and I can only imagine his (older) parents just tossed his computer. I wouldn't be surprised if he had had a few hundred BTC on there.

[cj]

That’s assuming he was smart enough to move his coins out of Mt Gox or whichever, now hacked, exchange he used at the time. (I wasn’t!)

[leros]

I have a lost wallet with about 300 Bitcoin sitting in a landfill somewhere. I tried out Bitcoin really early on and mined those over a few weeks. But they were worthless back then and I was burning electricity for "nothing" so I stopped. This was before that 10k Bitcoin pizza purchase happened. I have some regrets lol.

[ZeWaka]

Don't worry, we were also giving out millions (or more!) of dogecoin as tips on Reddit. Can't really get hung up on crypto shit.

[paulpauper]

have you tried to get the city to excavate it ? lol

[nso]

Someone gifted me 87 bitcoins back when they were worth ~0. They are still in some wallet somewhere I guess, and I saved the password on a harddrive I threw out around the same time

[afzalive]

For 9.7 million, I would spend a considerable amount of time trying to recover that.

[nso]

I don't even live in the same country anymore. I've looked at the files I have, and it's not there. It's gone.

[JKCalhoun]

> …recovers $400,000 using Claude AI after getting 'stoned' and losing wallet password 11 years ago

I had to laugh: the most Bitcoin story ever.

[DonHopkins]

If he was stoned, he would have probably spent his three bitcoins on pizza anyway.

The first pizza anybody bought that way cost 10,000 bitcoin, over $billion.

[zahlman]

>over $billion.

BTCUSD has been over 100k, but is not currently.

[snypher]

Oh, only a mere $810m today.