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.
There can be minor delays in the time but block times generally don't get longer because even if some miners stop mining, the blocks will still be mined by others. Less miners mean less competition for other miners and they will have more blocks to mine.
One of the probable reasons for blocks or transactions getting stuck at certain times is network congestion. When the price either starts going up or down, there tends to be a higher amount of on-chain transactions because people either transfer their Bitcoin from their wallets to sell them when the price is dropping or they buy from exchanges and send them to their wallets when it's rising.