If you look at the implication of those two together you see that total transaction value (in USD) has been fairly flat over the past year, with the exception of price spike periods: https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-...

There have been more, but smaller transactions.

edit: It should be noted the most active addresses are for known gambling sites: https://blockchain.info/popular-addresses

Yeah, "transactions" doesn't mean people are using it to pay for actual goods with their bitcoin, it's just every time btc moves from one wallet to another. I'm sure the volume of tulip transactions was very high during the tulip mania, too.

Fascinating! Are you suggesting an increase in use as a currency or just an increase in trade as a commodity?

To be honest I am not really qualified enough to have an opinion on that. All I have is my layman intuition being generally interested in cryptorotocol.

But in my opinion you see it growing because a lot more are thinking about the blockchain protocol rather than the currency. But it purely based on a hunch not actual data.

All that volume isn't from regular folk, it's probably from miners. Miners could decrease if its no longer profitable for them to continue or sink more $$ into capital