In some rare occasions in everyday life, what matters is seconds. Like when paying for parking in the car while some other cars are behind you in the line. You don't want them to get upset. 

I takes me tens of minutes to shop. But once you choose your merchandise and your payment starts processing, if the payment system allows several payments to be pending simultaneously and you're not blocking the next person to pay, then I don't care waiting some minutes for confirmation. But saving 10 minutes of confirmation is a lot.

I ague that our time is mostly measured in minutes (but I don't have any sociological, cultural, genetic or anthropological evidence). It takes minutes to read an e-mail, minutes to correct a bug, minutes to have lunch, minutes to drive to the office, minutes to talk to your kids. A payment taking 1 minute is much better than a payment taking 10. If I could choose a single thing to change to Bitcoin, I would lower the payment time, even within the minute scale.

Sergio

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 7:46 PM, Natanael <natanael.l@gmail.com> wrote:

Den 7 aug 2015 23:37 skrev "Sergio Demian Lerner via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>:
>
> Mark,
> It took you 3 minutes to respond to my e-mail. And I responded to you 4 minutes later. If you had responded to me in 10 minutes, I would be of out the office and we wouldn't have this dialogue. So 5 minutes is a lot of time.
>
> Obviously this is not a technical response to the technical issues you argue. But "minutes" is a time scale we humans use to measure time very often.

But what's more likely to matter is seconds. What you need then is some variant of multisignature notaries (Greenaddress.it, lightning network), where the combination of economic incentives and legal liability gives you the assurance of doublespend protection from the time of publication of the transaction to the first block confirmation.