The confirmation time is fine. There are alts with shorter confirmation time but at the cost of security.
The developer of Vanillacoin claims that he has improved the
network communications to a degree that a single confirmation is sufficient, with
variable block interval of 80-200 seconds. I haven't looked at the source very
closely, but I think he has optimized the transaction message format somehow.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=977245.msg11370378#msg11370378I'm a little skeptical about this, as even with fast transfer of messages,
any lags and connectivity problem on the user's end could lead to forking AFAICS.
But I'd be really interested in knowing whether the number of confirmations in Bitcoin is
merely a function of network propagation rate, or are there any deeper reasons
why the current implementation matters.