A satoshi (sat) is the smallest unit of Bitcoin. One Bitcoin equals 100 million sats. Most people who save Bitcoin think in sats, not in whole coins, because most transactions are much smaller than one full Bitcoin.

How many sats should I stack?

There is no minimum. Some people save 100 sats a day. Some save 100,000. The amount matters less than the habit. Stack what you can without stress.

Is stacking sats the same as dollar-cost averaging?

Close. Dollar-cost averaging means buying a fixed dollar amount on a regular interval regardless of price. Stacking sats is the same idea applied specifically to Bitcoin, usually in smaller amounts, often by sending sats to a wallet you already hold rather than buying on an exchange each time.

Do I need a lot of money to start saving Bitcoin?

No. You can receive a single sat. With Lightning, there is no dust limit and fees are usually less than one sat. You can start with whatever you have.

Where should I keep my sats?

In a self-custody wallet where you hold the keys. Keeping sats on an exchange means someone else controls them. A self-custody wallet like Piggy derives your keys on your device so only you can move your funds.

What is the best way to save Bitcoin?

Pick a self-custody wallet, send small amounts of Bitcoin to it on a regular schedule, and leave them alone. Using the Lightning Network keeps fees near zero, so even tiny deposits are practical. The best approach is the one you actually stick with.

What Is Stacking Sats?

A sat is one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin. Most people who own Bitcoin do not own a whole one. At current prices, a whole Bitcoin costs more than most people's savings accounts. So they save in sats instead.

Stacking sats means putting them aside over time. Not timing the market. Not trading. Just sending a small amount to your wallet on a regular schedule and not touching it. The phrase started in the Bitcoin community and stuck because it describes what most people actually do: accumulate slowly, in pieces, over months and years.

The math of small amounts

One Bitcoin = 100,000,000 sats. When someone sends you 21 sats, you received 0.00000021 BTC. Nobody thinks in that decimal. Everyone thinks in sats.

The reason small amounts work is Lightning. On the Bitcoin blockchain, there is a dust limit of 546 sats and fees that can exceed the deposit itself. On Lightning, you can send one sat. The fee is usually less than one sat. You can save 100 sats a day and actually receive 100 sats, not 100 sats minus a $3 fee.

This is not theoretical. Piggy users send sats to their Lightning address and they arrive in seconds. Some people feed their Piggy every morning. Some do it on payday. Some do it when they remember. Piggy does not care. It just eats whatever you feed it.

Why people do this instead of trading

Trading means watching the price, deciding when to buy, deciding when to sell, and being wrong most of the time. Studies from Dalbar show the average investor underperforms the market by about 3-4% per year, largely because they buy high and sell low on emotion.

Stacking sats removes the decision. You send the same amount regardless of whether the price went up or down this week. Over time, your cost basis averages out. You never buy the bottom, but you also never panic-buy the top. The only thing you have to do is not stop.

The Bitcoin community calls this being a "humble stacker." Nobody brags about saving 500 sats a day. But the people who have been doing it for three years tend to be happier with their position than the people who tried to time one big buy.

Where to keep them

Your sats should live in a self-custody wallet where you hold the keys. Not on an exchange. An exchange balance is a number in someone else's database. If the exchange gets hacked, freezes withdrawals, or goes bankrupt, your number goes with it. FTX customers learned this in 2022.

A self-custody wallet like Piggy derives your keys on your device from a passkey. Nobody else holds them. Nobody else can move your sats. The tradeoff is that nobody can recover them for you either, but passkeys sync through your device provider automatically, so losing access takes real effort.

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What Piggy is, a wallet that eats your sats and grows
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