If Lightwoods truly had 72 mirrors, he can't link them because either he didn't have them and they were trolling or they did but sold them for money.
Overall it doesn't mean much. These guys may have inflated the market and raised the price of an exalt because they were actually using them a lot because in most cases exalts are not used and are just used as a "100 dollar bill" of sorts to buy bigger ticket items.
But people don't realize the truth controllers of the market are the RMT shops such as d2legit and other sites. These sites bot themselves or have things in place to complete orders that people make on the site and have stock of things people probably buy such as exalted orbs and chaos most likely.
The influx of lightning coils and other T1 uniques that happened just recently 2 weeks into the league was completely RMT sites listing T1 unique items up at the price of just over an exalt most likely as either an error or they somehow felt they needed to remove the coils and other t1 uniques in their shop.
And just after that, there were t1 uniques up over night and people who frequent these shops and pay attention the value that currency has vs cash realized that Lightning Coils in tempest were going for 10+ exalts and the RMT sites had them up for 1.5-2x the price of an exalt so if they bought the coils, they could then resell and gain 5x the value that they put in if they were to resell the exalts they made back for cash.
And everyone thought that the coils may have been duped and some people still think that duping may have taken place even though GGG has stated they have no knowledge or no reason to think any did. But it's hard to gauge exactly what took place because Lighting Coil is tier 1 rarity now and for over 20 or more of them to just show up over night seems fishy. But I'll believe GGG no duping took place.
However, people need to be realistic with themselves. The same thing happened in diablo 2. When there's no official trading economy within the game or any type of marketplace and just player to player trading and forums. The result is what we have, people organized programs and a way to trade between each other earlier to get the items you want. And flippers and the whole 9 yards comes after that.
So did Lightwoods RMT? Who really knows, everything is for sure suspicious and there are literally countless of things he could have done to trade the mirrors into real money. For one , he could have even used d2jsp to funnel the currency into money. He could have contacted an RMT site and literally just did the transaction with them in a deal. He could be sitting on the mirrors still and plans to slowly convert them to whatever he wants to convert to money.
You are delusional is you think people aren't gaming the trading system. People may or may not be doing everything VOC says but one thing people are for sure doing is using RMT/Flipping and even botting to make a fairly large share of cash each league and able to either not have to maintain a bigger job or not work at all and PoE not only becomes a hobby for them, it becomes their job. Which means they are motivated to manipulate markets and even do things that are shady to get ahead.
GGG really did a poor job with these crafting mods. Because it's either they did not fully know the extent of what these mods could do or they did and the community had no idea what to expect and a few amount of people figured certain things out and completely influenced an entire league. And with the news that people tried the scouring methods before 2.0 and they didn't work and GGG made it work in 2.0 and did not mention anything about it seems like a bad oversight.
I'm very interested how what GGG decides to do with these mods.