shame I only found out about this story and this thread just a few hrs ago.
In my opinion he must have sold at higher price what people were buying to deposit the 500 ltc chip (or multiples of it).
9m ltc bought out there in the market without anyone dumping some big chunk would have pushed ltc well over 0.05, maybe even 0.1
I also noticed that in the first days (April the 18th, the day when the ponzi started) he used to move the entire amount collected the same day, obviously at some point (couldn't find the date) he stopped that practice, because the net amount is still 400k positive.
does anyone have more details about how and when he would repay the investors? have the early depositors collected any yield? Has anyone have news about him? did he use to post dates and location of his seminars? are they over?
The point here is to understand what's going to happen from now on and how that will affect the price. very interesting story indeed.
EDIT: more considerations.
As far as I understood, this guy went from city to city selling ltc as the new btc to the chinese. great idea. I mean, the chinese don't use twitter, skype, facebook, they could well adopt ltc instead of btc, would be quite reasonable, and desirable too in order to have better competition between different network, devs, mining etc.
now, the question: why stop now (well yesterday to be precise, just minutes after okcoin settlement)?
Usukan asked correctly:
Did he dump to start the earning scheme over again - that would be a smart move.
Did somebody else dump on him to ruin his earning scheme? Unlikely considering the scale - but certainly possible.
There are 1.5b chinese, and more middle class chinese than the entire American or European middle class combined by now. Potentially he could have spread the ltc word to many more users that bitcoin already has (in my estimates 50k all around the world with over 1 btc), and raised way more than the 50 million people spent (approximately) to bring the price from 1.5$ to 8$. There was room to bring it even up to 30$ with btc still at 300$. Unless as usukan said, they dumped on themselves on purpose in order to start all over again from lower prices.
Anyway, thanks to this guy, at least 6000-6500 people bought at least 500 ltc (would be 18k if there were only buyers of single 500 chip, but there are multiples, in any case 420 page of deposits x 20 = 8k, taken out the withdrawal maybe 500k, 7.5k left, and surely there are some doubles). Widespread adoption, in a certain sense, that can easily surpass that of bitcoin in china, probably that already happened (I don't think there are more than 10k btc user in china with more than 1 btc). If he also manages to get ltc adopted in china by some social network, the spontaneous adoption will do the rest: the price skyrockets and he will end his scheme succesfully.
So the final question then is: will this guy be able to keep the ball rolling for longer, or is he done?
Mostly it depends on the yields he has to return to the investors, and that can't be done on some mining operation as promised, he has to play the market to make gains! and by manipulating the market he might even succeed in the short term (which probably ended yesterday). Otherwise in order to make huge profits on the stake he has accumulated he needs some real chinese adoption of ltc instead of btc outside his scheme.
Let's keep this thread up and continue the investigation. It's fascinating!
