It's hard to speak about the infrastructure because:
1) it's complex and relies on a bunch of concepts that are niche/uncommon in tech field, so it's really hard to make a short answer that makes your point understandable without adding an essay-length explanation about why some assertion of fact is actually true, or how some aspect of the financial system works slightly differently than the common understanding and has serious implications that usually doesn't matter only because the system is carefully engineered to ensure that this never happens, but for a different system it would matter.
2) you can't have a purely technical discussion because pretty much every factor of infrastructure is part technical, part legal, part financial, and you can't really separate these aspects because they put serious constraints on each other.
3) it's a bit emotionally unpleasant because multiple important, relevant aspects have political connotations and invite passionate debate about things that I'd like to assume as axiomatic and offtopic to the main point. For example if we want to debate why technical payment systems are the way they are and what other technical payment systems are plausible in the short-term, aspects like the need for reversibility are pretty much an undisputable unavoidable constraint from the legal/economic side to the technical part; IMHO any productive technical debate is possible only about how to best design systems within these non-technical constraints (and what exactly are the actual constraints), but a lot of the discussion here is centered whether these constraints "should" be there - which is interesting but a completely different topic, to note the "is-vs-ought" distinction, debating whether reversibility (or, say, KYC/AML) ought to be a requirement has absolutely no relevance to the debate whether and when it is a requirement. But it's hard to make a technical description of how/why something works without getting sidetracked into a political discussion of whether some must-have requirement should have a right to exist.
There's not really an ethos of secrecy (at least for the main infrastructure side), all the technical and legal (but not financial) details are generally available to whoever is interested but they are large and details matter, and key details differ between countries. Seriously, when getting started in the industry when I had spent months reading on various details of e.g. card issuing/acquiring process, I thought I had a reasonable understanding.... and now I know how a bunch of that understanding was slightly but dangerously wrong.
1) it's complex and relies on a bunch of concepts that are niche/uncommon in tech field, so it's really hard to make a short answer that makes your point understandable without adding an essay-length explanation about why some assertion of fact is actually true, or how some aspect of the financial system works slightly differently than the common understanding and has serious implications that usually doesn't matter only because the system is carefully engineered to ensure that this never happens, but for a different system it would matter.
2) you can't have a purely technical discussion because pretty much every factor of infrastructure is part technical, part legal, part financial, and you can't really separate these aspects because they put serious constraints on each other.
3) it's a bit emotionally unpleasant because multiple important, relevant aspects have political connotations and invite passionate debate about things that I'd like to assume as axiomatic and offtopic to the main point. For example if we want to debate why technical payment systems are the way they are and what other technical payment systems are plausible in the short-term, aspects like the need for reversibility are pretty much an undisputable unavoidable constraint from the legal/economic side to the technical part; IMHO any productive technical debate is possible only about how to best design systems within these non-technical constraints (and what exactly are the actual constraints), but a lot of the discussion here is centered whether these constraints "should" be there - which is interesting but a completely different topic, to note the "is-vs-ought" distinction, debating whether reversibility (or, say, KYC/AML) ought to be a requirement has absolutely no relevance to the debate whether and when it is a requirement. But it's hard to make a technical description of how/why something works without getting sidetracked into a political discussion of whether some must-have requirement should have a right to exist.
There's not really an ethos of secrecy (at least for the main infrastructure side), all the technical and legal (but not financial) details are generally available to whoever is interested but they are large and details matter, and key details differ between countries. Seriously, when getting started in the industry when I had spent months reading on various details of e.g. card issuing/acquiring process, I thought I had a reasonable understanding.... and now I know how a bunch of that understanding was slightly but dangerously wrong.