The Most Important Bitcoin Developments This Week: January 3, 2015

NEW YORK (InsideBitcoins) — Following a day-after-Christmas rally when the price of bitcoin approached $330, the digital currency settled in to trade in a narrow range through the end of the year, rarely straying far from $315. However, the cryptocurrency began the weekend with a sharp loss triggered by higher volume late Friday evening, losing nearly 5% and trading just below $300 as of mid-morning New York time Saturday, according to the Inside Bitcoins Price Tracker.

Bitcoin ended  2014 with a -60% loss.

Other important developments for the holiday-shortened week included:

Russia and India seemed to relax their mostly negative stances on cryptocurrencies. Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development said the country’s previous definition of “surrogate money” was too vague and would “merely create legal barriers in the way of economic entities’ marketing programs and business activity in general.” Meanwhile, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan said in an interview, “I have no doubt that down the line, we will be moving towards primarily a cashless society.”

A bitcoin cloud mining pool went offline last weekend while at least one other gathered a growing number of disgruntled users, prompting questions about how to determine whether such services are profit producers or Ponzi schemes.

The BitPay-sponsored Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl garnered an audience of 3.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen Data  — enough to win the honor as most-watched primetime program on cable for the evening of its broadcast.

Japanese authorities told Yomiuri Shinbun the collapse of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was due mainly to fraud perpetrated by insiders, though no suspects were named.

For other events of the week, check the Inside Bitcoins news summary. And as always, for breaking news, follow us on Twitter @InsideBitcoins and join the conversation on Facebook.

Hal M. Bundrick is the Editor-in-Chief of Inside Bitcoins. Email: Editor@InsideBitcoins.com. Twitter: @HalMBundrick