Has nothing to do with bitcoinica and everything to do with a crazy gambling site which operates in a way that produces a ton of transactions.
yea, i have discovered satoshidice, even placed a bet myself. but the result is the same, flooding the block chain with transactions. that's a lot of overhead.
it looks like the # of transactions, and the # of transactions per block is growing geometrically
but total BTC in circulation is linear
and USD transaction volume & market capitalization is flat