You can't compare the two. A confirmed bitcoin transaction represents the final settlement of a non-reversible payment, and is spendable by the merchant immedia

You can't compare the two. A confirmed bitcoin transaction represents the final settlement of a non-reversible payment, and is spendable by the merchant immediately after those 10 minutes. Credit card payments are reversible for a period of a few months (so what you really get is a probabilistic payment, which requires fraud detection and risk management to properly handle) and can take 1-4 weeks to become spendable by the seller. Also, note that zero-confirmation transactions could still be relatively safe for low-value transactions, you don't always need the strong guarantees provided by confirmed transactions. Dealing with zero-conf does require some risk management, though. Finally, as I mentioned near the end of my previous comment - a write cache based on payment channels is currently being worked on, and will eventually provide us with real instant payments (which are also final and non-reversible, but with a deferred settlement).