Send a larger tx fee? The block time might help curb a gambling addiction as well by keeping compulsive gamblers waiting until hopefully the compulsion wears off.

Dont expect honest answers from BTC shills. Transaction times are a big FAIL for BTC.

Most probably an alternative will takeover its marketcap in the future

it depends i think. on the amount of btc you are transferring. but still some wallets have fast transactions, but either way you still have to wait

Instant transactions are already there in many alt coins. It remains to be seen if any of them really beats Bitcoin in market place.

And still any crypto is far better than fiat in terms of transmission times. Try international wire transfer,  it only takes 2-5 business days.

Perhaps I don't fully understand how bitcoins exchanges hands, either with or without confirmations.

There are a few restaurants that accept bitcoins as payment. If I order a roast beef sandwich and pay them with bitcoins, are they taking a risk if it does not get confirmed?  I realize that the cost of a sandwich is small so they might be ok with that risk. And besides, customers probably won't wait 90 minutes to get their food.

Perhaps this is the main problem with bitcoins that makes it difficult to go mainstream. With fiat, credit cards, or other types of payments, the payment is almost guaranteed immediately (unless it is reversed due to fraud or something else later on).

I was playing in number of casions and all of them accept 0 confirmation to add your bitcoins to balance for play. It`s up to merchant to accept payment this way.
The confirmation is done by finding blocks by miners which is in Average time defined, in the time of adjusted difficulty time may vary more. This is a functionality of bitcoin which is still far away big advance comparing fiat transfers.

Money transfers? Thats what only bitcoin is meant for? Long range money transfers?

I can pay for anything online in under 2 minutes with fiat or an alt, grab some popcorn to wait an hour for bitcoin

1 confirmation is a bit risky, because thee are some attacks that can be done without owning 51% of the network, but only 30-40%(they have less chances to succeed but they are still possible)

Monero has a shorter confirmation time, but that still isn't enough.

We need a confirmation time on the order of seconds.

How can this be achieved without creating a ridiculously sized blockchain and overcoming the problem of orphan blocks?

Crapcoins