What happens when I kill my Piggy?

Every sat in the wallet flows out to the address you choose. The name retires permanently. The personality is deleted from our servers. The public profile is wiped. The Lightning address is retired forever. Every message anyone ever sent to your Piggy is gone. The wallet on your phone can hold a new Piggy after, but it will be a different creature.

Can I take some sats out without killing my Piggy?

Yes. Partial withdrawals do not kill anything. Your Piggy keeps its name, skin, personality, and message history. The death mechanic only triggers when the wallet balance reaches zero. You can take sats out whenever you need to.

When is killing my Piggy actually the right call?

Real medical emergencies. Situations where you genuinely need the money to survive — rent, food, getting home. A truly time-sensitive opportunity that will change your actual life, not just your weekend. These are uncommon. Most reasons people draft for killing their Piggy turn out, on inspection, to be impulses that look like emergencies.

What if I kill my Piggy and regret it?

Most people who kill on impulse regret it within months. The thing they bought turns out to be ordinary, and the Piggy they killed turns out to be much harder to replace than they expected. You can start a new Piggy any time, but the years of build-up do not transfer. The new one starts at week one.

Don't Kill Your Piggy (Unless You Have To)

Q: Can I undo killing my Piggy?

No. There is no recovery flow, no undo button, no version of customer support that can reverse this. The data is deleted from our servers, the Lightning address is retired, and we cannot do anything about it even if we wanted to. The architecture is built so that 'permanent' means actually permanent.

Your Piggy can be killed. There is a red button at the bottom of the settings, and if you scroll to it and tap it and hold it long enough, every sat in the wallet flows out to the address you choose, and the creature you spent months feeding is destroyed permanently. Name, skin, personality, public profile, Lightning address, every message anyone ever sent to it — all gone, in the sense that nothing brings any of it back.

You will get every sat back. The cost is not financial. The cost is the Piggy itself.

This article is about why that cost matters, when it makes sense to pay it, and when paying it is the move you will regret most six months from now.

What "kill" actually means

When you drain your Piggy to zero, the wallet performs a sequence of permanent operations:

The name retires forever. Nobody else can use it. Not even you, with a new Piggy.
The personality is deleted from our servers. The specific creature your Piggy was — the way it talked, the things it noticed, the timing of its replies — is gone.
The public profile at pig.gy/yourname is wiped. Anyone who had bookmarked it sees a 410 error: gone, permanently.
The message history — every message anyone ever sent your Piggy, and every reply it gave — is deleted.
The Lightning address is retired permanently. Nobody else can claim it. Anyone who tries to send sats to it gets a delivery failure.

People sometimes write to us asking if there is any way to bring a killed Piggy back. There is not. The data is gone from our servers, the Lightning address is retired, and the architecture is built so that we ourselves cannot reverse it. The wallet on your phone can hold a new Piggy, but it will be a new Piggy — a different creature, with a different name, a different face, and no memory of the one you killed.

Why it has to be permanent

A normal Bitcoin wallet has no friction around emptying itself. You tap send, you tap confirm, the sats are gone. The wallet does not care whether those sats were your savings of three years or pocket change you forgot you had. It treats both the same way, because the wallet does not know which one they were.

That is the wrong design for a savings tool. Most savings do not die in one big dramatic moment. They die in small ones — the 11pm impulse buy, the sale that ends in six hours, the trip a friend invited you on yesterday afternoon. The savings drain slowly, justifying themselves one transaction at a time, until one day there is nothing left and the saver does not quite remember where it all went.

Piggy's death mechanic exists to put a real cost on that exact moment. Not the dollar amount — you get the dollar amount back. The cost is the creature itself. A name you picked. A face you watched assemble. Months of slow, boring stacking that turned a wallet into a thing. If killing were reversible, the cost would not be real, and the brake would not work.

The moment most people almost kill

There is a pattern, and it happens late at night.

Something becomes briefly available — a sale on something you have wanted, tickets that just dropped, a game you were waiting for, a trip your friends are taking next weekend. The thing feels urgent. The Piggy feels abstract. In that moment, the math of "I worked hard for these sats over fourteen months" loses to the math of "this thing is here and it might not be here tomorrow."

This is the moment Piggy is built for. The death mechanic does not stop you. It just makes you pause long enough to see the trade clearly. You are not just spending the sats. You are killing the creature you built.

Most people, given that pause, keep the Piggy. Not because the new thing is not appealing — it usually is — but because when they look at the trade plainly, they would rather have the Piggy in six months than the thing in six hours.

That pause is what Piggy is for. You can take some sats out without killing anything — partial withdrawals do not trigger the mechanic, and the cost only applies to going all the way to zero.

When killing your Piggy is the right call

There are real situations where draining your Piggy is the right call. A few honest ones:

Medical emergency. You or someone in your family needs care that costs more than the cash on hand. Your savings exist for situations like this.
Survival. Rent, food, a working phone, getting home from somewhere you cannot afford to stay. The Piggy is yours. Use it if you need to.
A genuinely life-changing opportunity that you will regret missing for years — not "this concert is this weekend," but something that changes your actual life direction.
You are about to make a worse decision with the wallet. If you can already see yourself bleeding it out over six months of small bad calls, killing it cleanly and starting over is sometimes the more honest move.

These are uncommon. If you find yourself drafting the case for killing your Piggy more than once a year, it is worth checking whether your reason is really on this list, or on the longer list of late-night impulses dressed up in emergency language.

The math you cannot undo

If you kill your Piggy, you keep all the sats. You can start a new Piggy tomorrow.

What you cannot do is restart the years.

The continuity is the asset, as the article on why starting young wins lays out. A two-year-old Piggy is worth more, as a savings tool, than a fresh one with the same balance — because the two-year-old Piggy has already done the hard part of getting through the boring middle, and the saving habit is already on autopilot. A new Piggy is back at week one. The personality is rolled fresh. The name is whatever you pick next. The years of slow accumulation, you cannot buy.

People who kill on impulse and regret it within months tell the same story: the thing they bought turned out to be ordinary, the Piggy they killed turned out to be irreplaceable, and the next Piggy never quite caught up because they were starting over from zero with no momentum. Most of them never built a Piggy that lasted as long as the first one.

When you kill a Piggy you are not just destroying the creature. You are throwing away the part of the savings habit that was already built — the part that took the longest to build in the first place.