Before Q-Day
What to Expect While We're Expecting
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The whole book, read aloud. 6 parts · 58 minutes total.
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About the book
The signatures that prove you own your coins are going to be replaced. That is not a prediction — it is a schedule.
In August 2024, after an eight-year public competition, NIST published the finished post-quantum signature standards, built to survive the quantum computer that breaks today's. The same institute has set the dates after which the old algorithms are deprecated (2030) and then disallowed (2035), and governments on several continents have published timelines in the same window. What nobody has published is the day the machine itself arrives — and nobody has yet written the instructions for moving your coins, because the address type you will move them to does not exist yet.
Before Q-Day is the holder's guide to that in-between time. It separates what is settled from what is still a guess, and it does not blur the line: the finished standards and the deadlines; the size jump, measured in bytes; how much Bitcoin is exposed, counted six different ways by six different counters, and why they disagree; where each chain actually stands, from Bitcoin's drafts to Algorand's finished, running answer; and the counter-case, argued at full strength by the people who think there is nothing to worry about for decades.
And for the meantime — the years between now and the move — it gives complete, testable practice: how addresses expose their keys and when, how to keep a seed offline, how to sign by QR with your keys never touching the internet, and how to change devices, or change wallets, without changing who holds the coins. The migration, when it comes, will be a move — not a rebuild. This book is how you are standing when it arrives.
Facts are stated as of November 2026, with sources. Where the record is unfinished, the book says so, in a chapter of its own.
Inside the book
- Part One — The Change That Is ComingWhat a signature is · The state of the machine · The standards are finished · The size jump · The deadlines · Exposure — how much, and whose
- Part Two — Where Each Chain StandsThe ones who already crossed · Bitcoin — drafts, not decisions · A short history of Bitcoin · Ethereum — the account route · Solana and the rest · Case study — Algorand · A short history of Algorand
- Part Three — The MeantimeAddress hygiene · The offline device · Signing by QR · Restore and sweep · How we do it
- Part Four — The Move, When It ComesWhat the migration will actually be · Lightning and the layers above · The unknowns, stated · The counter-case, fairly
- Appendix — Go DeeperFree courses and texts · The primary documents · Scholar and research communities · Hands-on tools · The standing trackers — for enthusiasts and scholars
The art
The art in this book is one painting, four times — an abstract work in ink on canvas by the artist, a nebula laid down in stages. Each stage opens one part of the book, so the painting finishes as the book does. Many stages, one work.
Stage 0 — the first washes. Posted as “Light 01”.
Stage 1 — the full colour nebula. Posted as “Gr33n”.
Stage 2 — the starfield. Posted as “Uni Galactic”.
Stage 3 — the deep field; the cover is this stage. Posted as “Darkening”.
Art by Douglas John Brownfield. The plates are photographs of the work at each stage, cleaned of their surroundings and otherwise untouched.
About the author
Douglas B. is an independent builder and artist based in Illinois. He builds self-custodial software tools — programs designed so the people who use them keep hold of their own keys, their own work, and their own decisions — and he holds his own assets the way this book describes: fresh addresses, an offline seed, signing done by hand on hardware he controls.
His abstract paintings, ink on canvas, take their cues from Hubble photographs of galaxies and nebulae, all wash and weather and deep space. One of them, in four stages, carries the art of this book.
Before Q-Day grew out of the author's own preparation. Faced with a scheduled change to the mathematics his holdings depend on, he went looking for the book that explained it plainly — what is settled, what is not, and what to do in the meantime — and then wrote the one he had needed.