take QS at his word.
You already did comment on them, and you seemed pretty certain:
Those seats were actually listed for sale
I shortened your quotes to make the discussion easier for you to understand.
QS brought up a concern he had. He was worried there was no liquidity on the buy side of the auction. I responded by saying NastyMining or myself would purchase up to 15 BTC of seats at 0.0005 BTC per seat (currently worth $833,250) if anyone was interested. That offer will put a floor under seat prices in BTC terms which is something I think people have wanted to see with this organization for a long time.