Arguably Bitcoin was a lot more conservative than it should've been in terms of stuff like the speed of confirmations, though, and in practice this has actually reduced security since all the popular payment services accept transactions with zero or one confirmations. With Bitcoin's sluggish design that's the only way to complete with the speed and convenience users are used to from services like credit cards and PayPal.

(If anyone here hasn't paid attention to the technical details of Bitcoin, the number of confirmations is a lot more important than the total amount of time taken on them. A lot of Bitcoin proponents tend to argue otherwise in order to encourage people to use it over newer alternatives, but they're fairly unambiguously wrong and even Satoshi's original white paper explaining Bitcoin makes this clear.)