Nonsense, many common payment mechanisms have horizons of _months_ before transactions become irreversible. Moreover, you can't simply reduce the time as though it were a free parameter. As the time between blocks falls below the time it takes nodes to globally communicate and validate new blocks the time until convergence tends to infinity. 10 minutes may have been more conservative than needed but it cannot be made arbitrarily low in a universe with a finite speed of light.
Whom want you to impress with such a beginner attitude stated in your last sentence? Almost all transaction in real life are much quicker than 10 minutes. Go to a train stop and image in 50 year use an electronic card when go into the train to pay. Or even today if you are in the shop and want to pay with your master-card. These TYPICAL transactions should be last say 10-15 sec AT VERY MOST. Therefore the time limit which is to be aimed at should be say 1 sec -- of course we have some decades time to reach it. If BTC-money payment only can go down to say 1 min, far more than 99 % of transactions in real-world usage will need another currency which is then of course of much higher importance, and then I see no sense to support BTC anymore myself -- it is (will stay) only a specialized currency in a small corner in the real world.
Bitcoin transactions are processed in a few seconds just like credit cards. You will not the keyword above was irreversible. It takes up to 180 days before CC transactions are irreversible. On that scale 10-60 minutes doesn't seem excessively long. It is certainly possible to accept 0-confirm transactions. For physical world, and low value transactions that is likely all that is necessary.
Also remember that the entire network needs to synchronize. That means propogation delays as well as verification delays need to be considered. Due to the nature of Bitcoin (verify -> relay -> verify -> relay -> verify -> relay ... etc) it may require multiple "hops" before all nodes have access to the same block. As gmaxwell pointed out 10 minutes is likely somewhat conservative one can certainly go lower but there is a cost and risk with going too low. Anything below 1 minute is likely not viable without excessively high rate of blockchain forks and orphaned blocks.
Lets compare some transaction times for settlement and funds availability
bitcoin 0confirm - ~ 1 sec
bitcoin 1confirm - ~10 minutes (varies 6 to 30 min within 1 SD)
bitcoin 6confirm - ~1 hour
ACH (including "billpay") - 72 to 120 hours
Bank Wire (domestic) - 4 to 12 hours
Bank Wire (international) - 24 to 72 hours
Western Union - 15 minutes (unless delayed due to fraud prevention)
CC (inducing CC based systems) unconfirmed - ~1 to 15 sec
CC (inducing CC based systems) confirmed - 2880 to 4320 hours
Costs:
Bitcoin < $0.01 per tx
ACH ~$0.10 to $0.35 per tx
Bank Wire ~$10.00 to $35 per tx
Western Union ~7% to 10% of gross settlement
Credit Cards ~2% to 3% of gross settlement
Debit Cards ~1.5% of gross settlement
Bitcoins unconfirmed and confirmed settlement times are as good or better than other payment networks and at a fraction of the cost.
Still it seems you aren't really interested in learning or understanding so .... Yup bitcoin sucks and everything about it was chosen to annoy you. You likely should click logout and ignore it for another decade or two.
