I know that we're all experts in archaic backup mechanisms and the encryption systems they used, but I think this qualifies as doing more than Ctrl+F
Also, it is right there in the article.
So I guess he might be glad he didn’t figure it out earlier.
The increase in compute (decrease in brute-force cost) combined with price increases in many crypto tokens means brute-forcing old wallets can become worth it years after passwords were forgotten.
And of course even smaller, local AI models can now easily write optimized scripts to brute-force any given KDF function.
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.
Thank you MtGox.
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.
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.
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.
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 got back to me two days later admitting their mistake and said our company now qualifies for $8k in tax credits. And a few months ago, it identified items in our AWS that saved us $250 a month (paying for itself).
So now I joke that even if I have a claude max plan, I've still come out ahead financially.
Feels like a system that is deliberatly made to be more punishing for those who can't afford the help or the education to figure things out.
But in this particular tax credit, there's no way for the gov to know automatically what percentage of payroll was spent in qualified R&D expenses, since it's day to day business operations. Which is why we are _forced_ to hire an outside firm and pay them thousands of dollars (when Claude did an even better job), just to analyze how much of our time qualified as R&D expenses.
The problem I have is that I am forced to have to find a firm to do this, and most firms won't even work with companies as small as ours. So then we're stuck and losing out on years of R&D tax credits at the moment, when I really don't need them anymore, to be honest.
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.
TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude
I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...
https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-glossary/what-is-bitco...
But lets be honest - when BTC hit 100 bucks, we would have cashed it out thinking we were geniuses.
Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.
Claude has limits that would make this simple statement be much more complicated-
Via Claude "So the chat upload file size limit is actually 500MB per file (not 30MB as many third-party sources claim - those appear to be outdated). The 20-file-per-chat cap and the 30MB-per-file limit in Projects remain consistent across plans. The real constraint at any subscription level remains the context window - how many tokens Claude can hold in memory at once during a conversation. "
I guess the user simply pointed Claude Code at a local folder containing all the backups and files, and Code went through them via find/ls/etc
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.
In the physical world, I can't imagine too many people being happy that old keys to your house still work even after you've changed the locks.
Can someone more informed, help me understand how this worked and why it's ok.
I'm genuinely wanting to become more informed & better understand.
notRobot•1h ago
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 had it write a python script and was able to recover all the images with their metadata. It's nothing a human couldn't have figured out, but it was definitely WAY faster than doing it myself.
I've also used Claude in the past to figure out how to break into routers with locked down firmware. It's great at suggesting and trying approaches.
arm32•1h ago
morpheuskafka•41m ago
kotaKat•12m ago
https://blog.acelab.eu.com/pc-3000-flash-spider-board-adapte...
michaelbuckbee•57m ago
ecommerceguy•25m ago
locknitpicker•24m ago
That doesn't sound very impressive. Not being tracked with a version control system is fixed instantly with a git init, git add ., git commit .no AI required.
Covering the app with tests is also something that requires no AI. At most, coding agents can generate characterization tests in broad sweeps, but we are talking about a delta between hand rolling and vibe-coding of a couple of days.
Where LLM shines is helping developers build up an understanding of what is in place. Running /explain on a codebase can quickly provide you with a high level summary of what's in place.
tucaz•47m ago
5 minutes later I had almost 3 hours of important footage recovered.
brunoborges•5m ago
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 anecdotal, not comparative.