C why would it take an hour to verfiy a transaction, credit cards are verified in seconds, is it due to the volume of 70k mostly satoshidice transactions? If btc starts to have millions of transactions what impact would that have on the 6 verification hops needed to verify? Only 70k trans now most days and its almost an hour, at 1m trans what would 6 verifications take in time?
Most transactions can be verified in seconds as once the transaction is accepted by the nodes and is sufficiently propagated throughout the network a merchant can generally consider the item paid for if they are selling a low value item as it costs a lot to even attempt any kind of double spending attack and most low value items would simply not be worth the cost to even try.
It is only for higher value transactions that it would take longer and a merchant would require to have n number of transactions prior to releasing the merchandise. However most items do to leave the merchants office/warehouse instantly anyway so a merchant can start work on the order once the payment is sent to the network and cancel the order if the TX does not confirm by the time the item is to be shipped.