Just wondering if anyone has noticed a trend of longer block times when the price drops. -snip-
Can you provide data or research that can back up this claim?
Anyways, that sounds plausible and even charts suggests that there may be truth behind your guess.
Let's use charts;
Based from bitinfocharts's charts, the peaks and bottoms of the average block time (
since you're using this as basis in your post) doesn't look tied to the average price:
The above doesn't tell anything since you shouldn't be using the block time since it's affected by luck and "
retarget" that changes the difficulty in every 2016 blocks.
You should compare it with the networks total hashrate that roughly tell how many miners are mining instead: