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.

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 different approaches.

TBF the real breakthrough was finding this, though no doubt they couldn't have recovered without Claude

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.

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.

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.

They are really underestimating their audiance here.

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.

By getting stoned he was forced to hold until AI could solve his problem at a crypto high.

This cycle is hostile in lots of ways, but the trustworthiness and absence of hostility in this dimension is quite nice.

The other day, I asked Claude to track down the leaked Claude Code source so I could study it. It refused, saying “given who made me, I’ll pass.” It gave me some pointers on how to find it myself, which worked.

There isn’t that much of a difference between “help me crack this bitcoin wallet” and “help me crack this executable.”

I don’t exactly have a solid point, just some general observations. First, I think we’ll see AI more and more simply refuse to do any kind of forensics, as forensics becomes more powerful. Second, that implies local models will become more valuable, since they’re the only ones willing to do that kind of work.

I once got myself banned from Claude by researching barbiturates, since they’re connected with suicide. So my third observation is that we’ll see an uptick in people getting punished for trying to do things with AI that people don’t usually do. (Luckily the unban form worked.)

Someone downthread asked “how’d he convince Claude the coins weren’t stolen?” Which is an interesting question, because presumably some people trying to crack a wallet have stolen it. So I guess the fourth observation is that the exact framing you approach an AI with will become more important. There was the classic “do this or I’ll cut off my arm,” which worked a year ago. But in the future it will be more like “hopefully the AI believes my story, or else I’ll get into trouble.”

It’s good there are multiple AI vendors, or else it’d get real dystopian real fast when the de facto AI’s policy becomes something you have no way of working around.

I'd love to mine a bitcoin a day on my PC now...

Claude found a file on the computer that the wallet owner had not found. Claude didn't crack a password or do anything magic, it just searched for a file that the wallet owner had not thought to search for before.

So, where the wallet owner had previously only tried to access /Users/example/wallet.dat, Claude thought, "why don't I check if there is another wallet.dat file elsewhere on the system?" which it did.

The outcome is the same, it is great that Claude tried something that the wallet owner hadn't tried, but this is more an example of how dumb humans can be rather than how smart Claude is.

The trillions of passwords are a red herring and unrelated to the solve.

Since we are dealing with Anthropic, the entire story could be staged of course.

> After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks ago, the user dumped their entire college computer files in Claude in a last-gasp effort. The bot uncovered an old backup wallet file that it successfully decrypted, while also uncovering a bug in the password configuration that was preventing recovery up to that point.

So it switched from brute-force searching passwords against a file, to brute-force searching files against a password?

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. "

… this dweeb had a file containing their seed in their backup, claude just searched through the files

Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...>

Claude Code deletes developers' production setup, including its database and snapshots <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...>