Just wondering if anyone has noticed a trend of longer block times when the price drops. I presume some proportion of miners become unprofitable. And that of those - some might need to convert to fiat in the short term to cover costs and so pause mining.
In the simplest terms, the miners who are mining at a loss when the price drops will stop mining. That means blocks are found more slowly on average, so average longer block times are longer. When the difficulty is adjusted (every 2016 blocks), the average block time will move back to 10 minutes.
However, the mining business is not that simple, so I doubt there is any real correlation between the price and the block times
in the short term.
OTOH, the average block time
is correlated with the change in price
in the long term because the average block time used in the difficulty measurement lags the current average block time,.