The topic of secrecy in development of various cypherpunk pet projects has been raised peripherally before by G. Toal and szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) brings it up explicitly:

There are several business proposals floating around the cypherpunks community that would require commercial licenses. I encourage the various crypto-entrepreneurs elaborate if they wish. Some of the proposals are quite interesting and illuminating. There's a strong habit of keeping business ideas "trade secret", which can be a bad idea, [...]

I'd like to motivate anyone developing various projects to be candid in describing their development. After all, there is enough room in areas such as Digital Cash for the entire population. In publicizing your efforts, you can unite with others who are developing similar ideas and can point out weaknesses in approaches that may cost you dearly to discover otherwise. In fact, to be secretive about the development of critical projects is extremely counterproductive from the point of view of the overall movement. Only the NSA believes that it can (1) keep important technology under wraps, (2) gain the upper hand in doing so. To a large degree, this petty secrecy is probably inherent to the Cypherpunk personality, one of those nagging glitches in the group psyche that is continually tripping up true progress and prompting the recent introspective meanderings about Cypherpunks Stalled. However, in volunteering information about projects, I also recommend that the author develop a thick skin and not be dissuaded by any negative comments that attack the whole foundation of the proposal as misguided. It is better to have written a program and toss it aside than to have never written one at all. === Now, along totally opposite lines of *discouraging* postings to anyone proposing digital cash ideas (or cryptographic ones in general) -- please, read at least *one* article on the subject in a magazine before coming up with your own Digital Cash Scheme Supreme, which may look rather naive and simpleminded in retrospect of further focused, serious consideration. Minor criticisms aside, over almost a decade Chaum has done an *excellent* job of putting together very solid and ingenious systems, and in both articulating and accomplishing the critical goals at stake. In fact, in reading his descriptions, one often has that inescapable satisfaction that goes along with all great research and discoveries, the vague feeling along the lines of `I wouldn't have thought of that, but now that you point it out, it's obviously critical and important'. In particular, the two survey articles mentioned by H. Finney bear repeating: Scientific American, Aug 1992 p. 96, and Communications of the ACM, October 1985, p.1030. The first is a rather `user friendly' introduction that goes some detail on the `representative-observer' relationship and the basics of blinding. The latter describes in much more detail his three-tiered system for what might be called `social privacy' (hinting at but still lacking most of the mathematics): dining cryptographers protocol creating totally secure anonymity in communication, the digital cash transaction that guarantees total anonymity, and the idea of institutions granting `credentials' to allow a person to develop and maintain reputations completely pseudonymously. This is all very epochal work, perhaps only exceeded in importance by public key cryptography in influencing vast new social and technological infrastructures.