What Is a Satoshi? How Many Sats Are in a Bitcoin
A satoshi, or sat for short, is the smallest unit of bitcoin. One bitcoin is 100,000,000 sats, so one sat is 0.00000001 BTC, a hundred-millionth of a bitcoin.
So you never have to buy a whole bitcoin. You can own 10,000 sats, or 50, and you can send a single sat over the Lightning Network.
Convert any amount with Rizful's free converters: sats to BTC, BTC to sats and sats to US dollars (and 45 other currencies).
How Many Satoshis Are in a Bitcoin?
One hundred million. Each row below is ten times the one above it:
| Sats | BTC |
|---|---|
| 1 sat | 0.00000001 BTC |
| 10 sats | 0.0000001 BTC |
| 100 sats | 0.000001 BTC |
| 1,000 sats | 0.00001 BTC |
| 10,000 sats | 0.0001 BTC |
| 100,000 sats | 0.001 BTC |
| 1,000,000 sats | 0.01 BTC |
| 10,000,000 sats | 0.1 BTC |
| 100,000,000 sats | 1 BTC |
A BTC amount has eight places after the decimal point, and the eighth place is one sat. To go from BTC to sats, move the point eight places to the right: 0.0025 BTC is 250,000 sats.
What a sat is worth in dollars changes all the time. On November 4, 2026, one sat was about $0.0008 and one dollar bought about 1,240 sats. The sats to USD converter shows the live rate (how it works: Satoshi to Fiat Converter).
Convert Sats to BTC
- Open Rizful's Sats to BTC Converter.
- Type a number of sats. The BTC amount appears as you type.
- To go the other way, use the BTC to Sats Converter. For dollars, use the sats to USD converter: it shows the amount in dollars and in BTC.
Under each converter, a table lists common amounts, from 1 sat to 1 BTC, with their value in dollars right now.
Can You Buy Part of a Bitcoin?
Yes. Apps and exchanges sell bitcoin by the dollar amount, and you get the matching fraction of a bitcoin. At $80,000 a bitcoin, $10 buys 0.000125 BTC, which is 12,500 sats. Buying a little at a time like this is often called stacking sats.
Why Is It Called a Satoshi?
The unit is named after Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin. Early users on the BitcoinTalk forum started calling the smallest unit a "satoshi" in 2010 and 2011, and the name stuck.
Bitcoin itself counts in sats. In Bitcoin Core's source code, every amount is a whole number of satoshis, and "one
bitcoin" is defined as 100 million of them
(src/consensus/amount.h):
/** The amount of satoshis in one BTC. */
inline constexpr CAmount COIN{100'000'000};
There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, so there will never be more than about 2.1 quadrillion sats (2,100,000,000,000,000).
Why Lightning Wallets Count in Sats
Lightning payments are usually small: a tip, a coffee, a few cents to a creator. In BTC those are long decimals (0.0000525 BTC). In sats they're whole numbers (5,250 sats), which are easier to read and type. So most Lightning wallets show sats, usually with the amount in your own currency beside it.
Rizful, for example, shows your balance in satoshis with the dollar value under it, and a tile that says how many satoshis one dollar buys. To pick a Lightning wallet, see The Best Bitcoin Lightning Wallets.
Inside Lightning invoices and payment requests, amounts go one step smaller still, to millisatoshis (msats, a thousandth of a sat). You'll rarely see them, because wallets round to whole sats.
Sats, Sat or ₿: How Wallets Write It
Wallets don't agree on how to write the unit. Here is what each one showed us in November 2026:
| App | Writes | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Rizful | satoshis (in the app), sats (in the converters) | 102,959 satoshis |
| Zeus | sats | 9,000 sats |
| Phoenix | sat | 28,358 sat |
| Wallet of Satoshi | ₿ | ₿5,000 |
| Alby Hub and Alby Go | ₿ | ₿1,646 |
| Lexe | ₿, under the dollar amount | $7.82, with ₿9,950 under it |
| Cash App | ₿ | ₿1,000 ($0.77) |
Every one of these amounts is in sats. "₿5,000" in Wallet of Satoshi is 5,000 sats, a few dollars. Some wallets also let you change the unit in their settings.
The Bitcoin Symbol ₿, and BIP 177
₿ is the bitcoin sign. It has been a standard character since 2017 (Unicode U+20BF, added in Unicode 10.0), and it was made for a whole bitcoin: Wikipedia, for one, writes the 21 million limit as ₿21,000,000.
BIP 177, "Redefine Bitcoin's Base Unit", proposes the opposite: call the smallest unit (today's sat) "a bitcoin", write it with ₿, and stop using decimals. Under BIP 177, ₿10,000 means 10,000 sats, which is 0.0001 BTC. The ticker BTC keeps its old meaning, 100,000,000 sats. BIP 177 is a draft: it changes nothing in Bitcoin itself, only how apps display amounts, and not everyone agrees with it (another draft, BIP 172, would make "satoshi" the formal name instead).
Some apps adopted it anyway. The Bitcoin Design Guide's Units and symbols page lists Wallet of Satoshi, Lexe, Cash App, Alby Hub, Bitkit, Blitz Wallet, Boardwalk Cash, StashPay, Cashu.Me, Agicash and Ecash App, and Square's point of sale.
So the same "₿1,000" can mean two very different things:
| Written | In an app that uses ₿ for sats | The older meaning (₿ = one bitcoin) |
|---|---|---|
| ₿1,000 | 1,000 sats, under a dollar | 1,000 bitcoins, tens of millions of dollars |
When you're not sure, look for the amount in your own currency next to it (most wallets show one), or type the number into the Sats to BTC Converter.
Other Bitcoin Units
| Unit | In BTC | In sats |
|---|---|---|
| bitcoin (BTC) | 1 | 100,000,000 |
| millibitcoin (mBTC) | 0.001 | 100,000 |
| bit (μBTC) | 0.000001 | 100 |
| satoshi (sat) | 0.00000001 | 1 |
| millisatoshi (msat, Lightning only) | 0.00000000001 | 0.001 |
FAQ
How much is one satoshi worth?
It follows bitcoin's price. On November 4, 2026, one sat was worth about $0.0008, less than a tenth of a cent. See the live value in the sats to USD converter.
Is a satoshi a separate coin?
No. A satoshi is a unit of bitcoin, the way a cent is a unit of a dollar. There's no separate satoshi coin to buy.
What's the difference between "sats" and "satoshis"?
None. "Sats" is short for satoshis, and "sat" for one satoshi.
Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The name used by the person or group who created bitcoin, published its white paper in 2008 and left the project in 2011. Nobody knows who it is. More on bitcoin itself: What Is Bitcoin.