Are you kidding? It is not uncommon to see new blocks mined as rare as one per hour. If the major mining pools (which mine over 90% of new blocks) stop operation, the blockchain will be frozen
You are exaggerating. If 90% of the hash rate turns off, then blocks will be found on average every 100 minutes (instead of every 10 minutes) until the next difficulty change, which will be in less than 140 days.
Everything will return to normal in less than 175 days.
Okay, let's take your figures. Now we allegedly have 10 minutes between confirmations on average. I don't believe these numbers (the transaction weighted mean interval should be significantly higher, simple average being useless), but given that it is often much more than that (50-60 minutes and above), it would amount to 500-600 minutes if 90% of the hash rate is turned off. 600 minutes is 10 hours, Carl. Now we have 10 hours of waiting within which the network is essentially down, and many thousands (millions?) of unconfirmed transactions piling up...
Do you really think Bitcoin will ever recover from that glut? After a
week Bitcoin will be as dead as a doornail due to escalation effects
| Period | Block TIme | Duration |
| Current | 100 minutes | < 140 days |
| +1 | 25 minutes | 35 days |
| +2 | 10 minutes | 14 days |
I don't quite understand what this table means. Care to explain?
If you claim that often blocks are found only after an hour then you can't let fall under the table that with the same chance blocks are found way faster than 10 minutes. The 10 minutes really are the average that was mathematically determined to be used to the next time.