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April 16, 2014, 03:13:43 PM |
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Transaction times take less than a second, up to a few seconds. You can do an experiment yourself - just send a bitcoin from one address to another and see how long until it reaches the rest of the network (e.g. monitor the receive address on a site such as blockchain.info) - it happens practically instantly. Once transactions are accepted into the network with fees and no other issues (e.g. malformation) they will confirm in all but one in a billion circumstances. Double spends at that point are nearly impossible because they will be rejected. There have been hundreds of discussions about this so I won't recount them all here, but they will help increase your understanding.
Confirmations take longer, but for most day-to-day purchases aren't necessary. Perhaps for a non-trusted, no-recourse relationship for more than 10s of thousands of Euros, confirmations are important, but they are still much faster than wire transfers and the like. Waiting an hour or so for a 1 million Euro transaction to have 6 confirmations is like lightning compared to the alternatives. The alt-coins buy little with faster confirmations since their networks are less secure.
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