Isn't bitcoin too slow to be used for many transactions?<p>Right now, you can walk into a convenience store, buy a pack of gum, pay with your credit card, and the transaction clears within ten seconds or so.<p>From what I understand, a bitcoin transaction isn't set in stone (that is, the money could be double-spent) until it's placed in a block that someone mines - and to prevent problems with people mining the same block twice, multiple blocks. Since one block is mined every ten minutes, we're talking significant time to process a transaction.<p>There are ways around this - but IIRC they involve an intermediary that both sides trust. That intermediary is unlikely to work for free, so it looks like there would still be a problem.<p>It's possible that I'm misunderstanding something, or that someone has come up with a clever solution to this problem since I last checked - in which case, I'd like to know what the answer is.