Since the code is open source, what's stopping someone from releasing zerocoins before it's release in July?
Nothing, but no one will/should trust them without cryptographic expert consensus saying it's ready. Right now, the cryptographers most familiar with it are working on/with the official team and aren't clamoring to release it yet. And anyone doing an early release will need to handle the initial parameter selection which has to be done publicly/securely to convince people that the private key toxic waste (that would…
If my request to participate in the parameter generation is granted, I'm going to use TAILS with no persistence to generate then manually copy the base64-encoded public key over to my other computer, then I'm terminating the other machine.