Is there any chance that the confirmation process will pick up in speed here in the future? I think some people are not accepting them because the time it takes to confirm a transaction. I know I do not want to be standing in a store for 20 minutes or longer to wait for a candy bar.
when there is a fix for malleability (preventing messing with transactions before confirmation) then people can send and not need to wait for confirmations on small priced goods.
some fixes range from mining pools dropping tx's if a existant tx exists using the same origin funds (that way 2 tx's using same funds cant both wait for confirmation)
some fixes range from locking funds into bots and then moving around in offchain channels freely, and then be confirmed later when the channel closes and all senders-receivers are settled.
some fixes involve using exchanges internal 'trade keys' or usernames for people to send funds to eachother within an exchange
some fixes involve raising the blocksize limit so that miners have no excuse holding peoples tx's to ransom, and all tx's can be confirmed in 10 minutes or less
some fixes involve retailers accepting altcoins (sidechains) to have improved confirmation times and less bottleneck
but if your asking will bitcoins average blocksolving time go from 10 minutes to, lets say 2m:30s or 1m:15s... um no. as that would cause to much issues in regards to difficulty changes, reward halving times, rewards and mining hardware