A guy lost his Bitcoin password for 11 years. Last week, an AI got it back in an afternoon.

The story bouncing around Hacker News this week is too perfect: an old wallet.dat file from 2014, forgotten password, roughly $400,000 in BTC sitting frozen inside. The owner finally pointed Claude at it. The AI wrote a smart, context-aware brute-force script using everything it could infer about the owner's life. Hours later, the wallet was open.

Most coverage frames this as a feel-good AI win. It is not. It's a flashing red light for anyone who still thinks their old passwords are safe.

What actually happened (the part the headlines skip)

Claude didn't break SHA-256. It didn't crack elliptic-curve crypto. It did something much more mundane, and much more dangerous for you:

It wrote a targeted dictionary attack.

A real wallet brute-force at scale is impossible — the keyspace is too big. But humans don't pick from the full keyspace.…