Sorry, I don't get people asking for faster confirmations. I understand it's sometimes frustrating to wait, but faster confirmation times = less secure confirmations. If you changed the block target to 5 mins, then services waiting for, say, 3 confirmations would simply require 6. No difference.
^ I share this viewpoint.
But then I realized one factor that makes faster transaction times an
actual improvement: Once a bitcoin spend is actually confirmed in a block on the blockchain, this then prevents a
double spend from occurring. So, the longer the block times (i.e. 10 minutes on average), the more opportunity for double spends. If block times were set to 60 seconds for example, then the potential criminal attemping to do a double spend would only have an average of 60 seconds to do so.
If it wasn't for this one factor then there would be no reason to speed up block times because what you said is true.
The question is: what is the optimal block time, and does changing this figure actually offer enough benefit to make the change worthwhile. It would be a huge fork. block rewards would have to change too because they would happen every minute instead of every 10 minutes. So instead of getting 25BTC per block, you'd get only 2.5 BTC per block. Honestly, this kind of change seems too drastic to occur to me. I accept bitcoin for how it is now, and just understand how the technology works so I don't get screwed over. Education is always going to be a part of using any digital currency.
