10 minutes on average if you pay the correct fee is . Where the correct fee is whatever is required to evict someone else from the next block . It doesn ' t mean Bitcoin is more reliable , it just means some other poor guy is suffering instead of you . EDIT People are clearly misunderstanding what I ' m trying to say here . Lets look at it more simply . Imagine there are 10 , 000 people who want to use Bitcoin . However there isn ' t enough capacity , so only 5 , 000 are able to , while the other 5 , 000 are left out . Now imagine that all of those 10 , 000 doubled , trebled , even decupled their fees , what happens then , can all 10 , 000 people use Bitcoin ? No , nothing changed , there are still 5 , 000 who cannot use Bitcoin . The fee level is irrelevant , except for pricing people out of the market eg . fees rise until there are only 5 , 000 people who want to use Bitcoin .