Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, which has been advocating for the advancement and free use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, says Bitcoin still needs about five more years to be powerful.

Coin Center is a Washington think tank that studies the Blockchain and digital currencies.

Brito, who has been involved in advising the government to take a light regulatory approach as the technologies evolve, thinks that now is the best time to get involved in the cryptocurrency.

Jerry Brito has been a vocal Bitcoin advocate since 2014 when he launched Coin Center as an independent nonprofit research center, focused on the public policy issues facing cryptocurrencies.

He said in Chedder Live that:

“If we compare Bitcoin to the early internet, we didn’t get the real Web until the mid 1990s with the introduction of Netscape and it took five more years before we got Google to make the Web useful and it wasn’t until five years after that that we got Facebook and Netflix and things that we take for granted today.

So where are we today? Look, I think we are five to ten years from the true kind of power that everybody is expecting. But that means it’s also a good time to get in.”

Pro-Bitcoin policy

While you may not agree with the view shared by Brito, who has been particularly vocal about the challenging regulatory landscape that companies seeking to innovate, with the development of open Blockchain network technologies, face in the U.S., others may see it as a response to the question of whether Bitcoin - as well as other top cryptocurrencies - would still be around for the next five years.  

As the founder of a small Washington think tank that studies the Blockchain and digital currencies, he has been involved in advising the government to take a light regulatory approach as the technologies evolve. They support a resolution calling for a pro-bitcoin national policy that was introduced in the US Congress - the bipartisan H.R. 835 that was introduced by Rep. Adam Kinzinger and co-sponsored by Rep. Tony Cardenas.

He, along with advisory board members Marc Andreessen and Fred Wilson, all made the 2016 POLITICO 50 list of top DC influencers as the “money men of the future.”