> At a minimum, one must wait ten minutes for the proposed transaction to be included in the block chain, and for large amounts it is customary to wait for six

> At a minimum, one must wait ten minutes for the proposed transaction to be included in the block chain, and for large amounts it is customary to wait for six blocks, or one hour. These times are much slower than those to complete electronic retail transactions in most other currencies (e.g., a few seconds to charge a credit card either online or at a physical retail location) the person who wrote this is a senior economist? First of all, you don't must wait ten minutes or one hour, you wait iff you want confirmations from other peers saying that the transaction is actually included in the blockchain, more time you wait more confirmations you get. But in the practice you only do this when you can't trust the other party, and many times the other party is using an well-known online wallet that let you use a green address (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address). So, you can have almost instant transactions with Bitcoin. Actually credit cards don't takes just "a few seconds to charge", that's what the final user thinks, but the reality is that it may take weeks to process and transfer the money to the seller bank account. And also the level of fraud with CC's is astounding; that's why we have to pay a lot of fees (I mean, CC's intrinsically needs insurance). Here is a interesting series of articles about CC: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/what-you-need-to-know-about-credit-card-processing/ http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/what-you-need-to-kn... By the way, with real cash the time for a transaction is equal to the time of one party giving one or more bills to the other party + the other party verifying if those bills aren't fake + (not always but usually) give the change. :)