When I was a child, I did not really understand stock markets.

Sure enough, I knew that every corporation had stock; I knew that the stock price could go up and down; I knew you could buy stocks and profit or lose accordingly. But I thought these were all just numbers going up and down randomly. I did not know what caused these changes, or indeed, that they were caused by anything at all.

I recall one day when my father referred to the CEO of some company as being successful, seeing that he managed to bring the company’s stock price up. I was confused. Stock prices just behave randomly, right? How is the price going up any indication of that person’s performance?

As I grew up, I have learned that the goal of a corporation is to generate profit; I’ve learned that the company shares these profits with shareholders in the form of dividends; that people are willing to pay for the stock in order to enjoy these dividends, either directly or indirectly. The greater the profit potential of a company, the higher the price people will be willing to pay for its stock. If the stock price goes up, it is because the company is doing something right, and by extension, so do the people in it.

It surprises and saddens me that these days, “professional” economists hold the same naive views about financial markets that I did as a child, at least as far as their criticism of Bitcoin goes. They talk about how the exchange rate of Bitcoin goes up and down wildly without representing anything; how it is stupid to buy bitcoins; how people who want to gamble are better off in the casino or the stock market.

What they fail to mention is that Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized digital currency. It is like the money we know, only better (in about a dozen ways). In the same way that companies generate profit, currencies facilitate commerce. The better the currency is at its job, the more it will be in demand, and the higher the price people will be willing to pay for it. And Bitcoin has what it takes to be great at its job.

For sure, there is a lot of uncertainty and speculation. If you look at the price of any traded asset, Bitcoin included, in a short enough time scale, it will be indistinguishable from Brownian motion. The short-term fluctuations are noise. But the long-term upward trend from 0 to the $700 range is the signal. It means that Bitcoin is getting better and better at its job, thanks to the brilliance and hard work of its inventor and supporters.

Bitcoin is not about the price going up, that is just a natural side effect of doing well what it is about. People who profited from it are, for the most part, not people who gambled and won – but people who had the foresight to see something big is happening, spent the time to learn what this is, understood what Bitcoin is about, believed that it would be successful, and were right. In so doing, they helped Bitcoin become what it is today, and for that they are fairly rewarded.

So to all the investment advisors that hold the financial worldview of a 10 year old, my message is – please, grow up.