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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the crazy currencies edition of Slate Money,

your weekly guide to the business and finance news of the world.

I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion in New York, and on today we have not one, but two crazy currencies.

We're going to talk about the one which is plunging

Bitcoin, and we're going to talk about the one which is soaring, which is known in the FX world as Swissy.

So Kathy O'Neill is going to tell us all about her good friend Swissy. I'm very interested in this one because I'm going to be in Switzerland in just a few days' time.

We'll talk about that too.

And we're also going to talk about the good news of the week.

The good news in the wage market seems they're going up those wages things.

So welcome Kathy O'Neill, data scientist, blogger, mathbabe, dot org, generally awesome person. Wow, well. And welcome to Slate's Moneybox columnist Jordan Weissman. Hello, Felix. Hello, Jordan. Now, you are going to kick us off by talking about the plunging currency. Is it even a currency, Bitcoin?

Yeah, that's a really good question. My friend Matt O'Brien at The Washington Post likes to refer to it as a Ponzi scheme for libertarians to extract wealth from one another, not a currency, but that might be a little bit of an extreme view.

I thought that was gold. I mean, digital gold, right? Anyway, so Bitcoin has dropped quite a bit in the past few days.

...