BTC chain is due its routine difficulty increase and judging by data from:

We can expect to see difficulty increase of ~8%. Such change happens every 2016 blocks, what makes this happening interesting is that at the same time price of BCH (Bitcoin cash chain) is rising and it’s difficulty is decreasing dramatically due to adjustments happening to account for difficulty inherited from original BTC chain during the split.

There is a chance for BCH chain to become more profitable temporarily, hence attracting miners from BTC chain to move their hash power over to it.

If this happens we might see significant increases in BTC validation times given that enough hashpower moves to BCH chain.

Above events are not likely to happen, but never the less BTC chain needs all hashing power it can get as SegWit is not active yet (you can keep track of it over at http://segwit.co) and its mempool is being spammed (as this article is being typed) resulting in network clogging.

~SC

As always a side note on our sponsor Genesis Mining, we have 3% discount code available: wVuZfb to help you get started with cloud mining, you can learn more about it here.