Faster? I bet most merchants can't spend the funds received by Mastercard payment in 10 minutes. In any case, the Bitcoin network will only get faster as more participants enter the system.

Safer? Definitely not for the Mastercard using merchant, who takes on the risk of chargebacks and fraud which are impossible with Bitcoin. For the consumer, it's trivial to steal a credit card number, and I'm comfortable betting that my bitcoin wallet application is hard to hack than web browsers where I enter credit card info every day.

This is pure propaganda by MC, and only proves that they are terrified of digital currency.