Marcelo R. Bianchi, an Argentinian expert in cryptocurrency wallet recovery known within the network as @marcebit, has published an open call offering 0.5 BTC (equivalent to approximately USD 31,000) to anyone who can crack the password of a Bitcoin Core wallet created in 2013.
According to Bianchi, the owner of the funds encrypted his wallet without worrying about the process, and when he tried to withdraw the accumulated funds, I don’t remember setting a password.
According to Bianchi’s publication, a version of Bitcoin Core that went into effect in 2013 proposed using 10 or more random characters or phrases of 8 or more words when encrypting, but this requirement was not mandatory. Experts say that owners: If you think your password may contain the word “wallet” or “wallet”This limits the search space for attempting brute force recovery.
This is not the first time Bianchi has made this call public. In May 2025, he initiated a similar call with a reward of 0.23 BTC (nearly $20,000 at the time) but received no results. According to the publication, the current call for Increased reward to 0.5 BTC He warned that even if the case could not be solved, those who cooperated in related ways could receive a small donation.
To facilitate recovery attempts, Bianchi published Hashcat hashes corresponding to the encrypted wallets. As well as publicly accessible web tools hosted on GitHub You can run password tests manually without downloading any additional software.
AI as a Bitcoin Recovery Tool
In a tweet after the conference call, Bianchi mentioned two options for those who want to approach the case with more computational power. That means using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model Claude Mythos, which launched on June 9 of this year, or Fable 5, or renting a cluster of GPUs through the Vast AI platform. However, this proposal has certain limitations. As reported by CriptoNoticias; Fable 5 blocks queries in cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillationredirect those answers to Claude Opus 4.8. Hashcat-encrypted password recovery falls into the category that the model restricts by default.
This incident highlights a recurring problem in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Loss of access to funds due to key or password management errors during the first few years of implementation. According to estimates by blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, approximately 20% of Bitcoin’s circulating supply is thought to be permanently inaccessible for this type of reason. Bianchi notes that he has been conducting similar research since at least 2018, when he published a similar case on the Bitcoin Argentina Facebook group.
More than a year after the case remains unsolved, the phone remains open despite the doubling of the reward. The AI path proposed by Bianchi himself clashes with the limitations that the most advanced models generally available to the public impose in the field of cybersecurity.
