Therefore it is reasonable to suppose that small-world effects will disconnect the bitcoin price relationship from transaction volume, in that the future whole Bitcoin network will not be uniformly well connected but rather be clusters of well connected nodes.
I don't see how this applies to Bitcoin. One of its fundamental properties is the decentralized consensus, as long as this mechanism works all nodes must be in the same state. By definition there can't be any clusters that behave differently and connectivity is not an issue as long as there is a connection to the network. Unless you are assuming that forks could exist alongside each other in completely disconnected networks, but then Bitcoin has failed as a whole.