what controls how many will get put onto the market?, is there a limited amount of them,
As far as I can tell, TAT is free under the contract on Bitfunder to release more shares at any time, without advance notice, and to set any "fair market price" when doing so. In fact it looks like he has done so once already -- there were originally 100k shares released, but now it looks like there are 115k total shares released. I don't know if the additional 15k shares released at a later time were also sold at .007 or not, but TAT was probably not contractually obligated to set the price precisely at that level even if he happened to do so.
It is also my understanding that TAT is currently looking into the process of launching the same investment on at least one if not two other exchanges (btct and Havelock). If successful, this would obviously result in the creation of more shares as well, albeit in a sister market.
So scarcity of shares, in the sense of a stable and known number of shares where the share issuer does not arbitrarily create more, does not appear to be a feature of this asset.
The asset will not be released on Havelock, this I can confirm. It's release on BTCTC is in question, but uncertain at the moment.
Some new "units" (I have to be careful with these terms...) were sold within the first 36 hours of the IPO release at roughly .0075 and higher. I have not participated in the market since then.
Oddly, other speculators seem to be holding down the price for now.
Regardless, the intent of this asset is to be denominated as 1MH/s. While I can affect the market value by releasing more, I cannot totally control the market from speculators or increased demand over time. I want to see a healthy price, just as much as the other unit holders. Generally, this asset is still undervalued when compared to other mining assets, or, you can say the others are overvalued...
I plan to take some time to see if I can think of a regulated way to issue new shares in the future, but I cannot promise a magical solution. At the moment, I have sold as much as I'd like to, and will probably not reassess until this weekend.
I can tell you that if the asset does get approved for release on BTCTC, I won't be releasing as many shares there (in the short term at least), and it will make it much less likely that I will release new shares on Bitfunder (in the short term).