The "takes a while to confirm" is a shortcoming of politics in bitcoin today. Blocks are limited to 1MB, there are more than 1MB of transactions almost all the

The "takes a while to confirm" is a shortcoming of politics in bitcoin today. Blocks are limited to 1MB, there are more than 1MB of transactions almost all the time now, so some transactions (the ones paying the lowest fees) get delayed multiple blocks and take forever to be confirmed. That will eventually be fixed, and once we are back to normalcy where transactions aren't limited by block size, you can regularly get - even on feeless transactions - multiple confirms in seconds. Your transaction won't be finalized until it enters the block, but once you have a half dozen or more confirms the probability of failure of that transaction entering is extremely low - well below 1% at that point, insofar as I have never seen it happen myself and don't know anybody who has had a multi-confirm transaction miss acceptance.