I also have noticed an alarming trend.
290529 32 minutes 990 12,120.23 BTC GHash.IO 340.91
290528 51 minutes 1154 13,321.32 BTC GHash.IO 340.99
290527 1 hour 21 minutes 995 11,982.17 BTC GHash.IO 341.03
290526 1 hour 48 minutes 259 653.12 BTC Discus Fish 95.76
290525 1 hour 53 minutes 253 2,543.48 BTC BTC Guild 99.38
This is not one every 10 minutes. I know we are getting over 144 blocks a day, but there seems to be frequent times where we go hours between blocks and 4 in a row like this?
This is not an alarming trend, and it is not new. This is the way bitcoin has always worked. There has never been any guarantee that blocks will occur every 10 minutes. The process results in a Poisson distribution. As you pointed out, there are more than 144 blocks per day, so the
average rate is still less than 10 minutes.