As I noticed recently when it took hours for my mincoin transfer to confirm... we don't seem to be hitting anything near the desired "1 minute per block" rate. At least for the past day or two, it looks like we've only been getting about 3-4 blocks per hour on average.
So, what happened? Was there recently a large exodus of MNC network hashpower? Maybe after the difficulty was pumped high, some big miners/pools redirected their hardware to a different altcoin and the MNC network hashrate crashed?
How long is it until the next difficulty update? Is the difficulty expected to drop then, to bring us closer to the 1-minute block rate?
Sorry for the newb questions.