I think that fear is unfounded at this point. August 2012 data is quite old in this rapidly evolving economy. USD exchange volume has gone up 10 fold since then: https://blockchain.info/charts/trade-volume and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Of course there's no way to be sure, but I doubt more than a small fraction of that is from an increased SR userbase. The number of legitimate uses of bitcoin is expanding and diversifying. The FinCEN report that came out a few days ago and affirmed the legality of bitcoin will give many large and mainstream businesses the confidence to integrate it as a payment option. Bitcoin isn't dependent on any single merchant anymore, if it ever was. (It's also noteworthy that when SR suffered an extended downtime in November 2012 because of a huge increase in users, there's no noticeable blip in the exchange trade volume. There were bigger spikes in October.)