Bitcoin Weekly 2014 April 30: Bloomberg adds Bitcoin to their market index, MIT to produce campus-wide bitcoin …

A day late, but not a bitcoin short, the Bitcoin community is seeing some recognition this week in the financial sector with Bloomberg adding a Bitcoin market index to their professional services. Two MIT students will be giving $100 worth of bitcoins to pupils on campus to start a small bitcoin economy and study spending trends. Mexico just got its first Bitcoin exchange, and a lot of reasons to make use of the virtual currency to provide easier money transfer services.

Read on to see this weeks Dr. Bitcoin and more.

Bloomberg to list Bitcoin market prices

Bloomberg has started providing market prices for Bitcoin to over 32,000+ subscribers to the Bloomberg Professional service.

In a post on Bloombergs official blog the service will pull its market information about Bitcoin from the Coinbase and Kraken exchanges. This is part of a push to start tracking information on virtual currencies, writes Bloomberg, which will be included alongside Bitcoin values. As live Twitter feeds have been integrated into Bloombergs professional trading platform, users will also be able to watch data coming in about other currencies.

To access this information, users need only type the code VCCY on the Bloomberg Professional service.

The fact that Bloomberg only pulls an index from two exchanges when the Bitcoin marketplace contains a multitude of exchanges has brought a sense of wariness to some coverage. For example, The Wall Street Journals coverage carefully mentions that it only cites two exchanges. According to the BitcoinAverage bitcoin price index the three biggest exchanges by volume are Bitstamp, BTC-e, and Bitfinex making up 94.5% of the known market. Kraken represents only 0.04% of the total volume and Coinbase does not publish its volume for buying/selling BTC.

Still, there are many reasons to see Bloomberg listing Bitcoin prices as a source of legitimacy for the currency. Bloomberg itself is in competition with other financial services when it comes to trade and investment and being first-to-market when it comes to indexing pricing may lead others to do the same.

Two MIT students plan a half-million dollar Bitcoin economy

MIT, the birthplace of brilliant minds and innovative technologies, will become the first campus with its own working Bitcoin economy. Two students have raised half a million dollars to distribute $100 worth of bitcoins (about 0.22 BTC) to every MIT student.

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Bitcoin Weekly 2014 April 30: Bloomberg adds Bitcoin to their market index, MIT to produce campus-wide bitcoin ...