I think one of the big flaws with any discussion of the volume of Bitcoin moving around is the fact that it can be transferred from one address to another where both addresses are owned by the same group or individual.

With a transaction fee of 0.0001 you could create an enormous amount of "transaction volume" on the network with just 1BTC moving from address to address but never leaving the control of a single owner.

This is not necessarily done intentionally, for example lets say I buy BTC1 on an exchange.

Then I move it from the exchange to a wallet in Armory on my PC.

Then because I want to save some of it and spend some of it I move BTC0.20 to a paper wallet.

That alone creates BTC2.20 of transaction volume, when the only transaction involving another party was the BTC1 purchase....