Far from being a problem for the mobile payments industry, bitcoins could be its salvation.

The marketplace is awash in mobile payment apps, said Roger Ver, an investor in blockchain.info and funder of the Bitcoin Foundation. But the apps all suffer from the same two problems that drastically limit their utility:

1. They’re walled gardens, and don’t speak to each other
2. They don’t work if you leave the United States

“Bitcoin solves these two problems,” Ver told the audience at Money2020 in Las Vegas. He was speaking on a panel that was, to put it mildly, bullish on bitcoin’s future.

Ver pointed to the insularity of the United States leading to other problems as well. “In Europe and in other countries, merchants’ systems are prepared to handle multiple currencies,” he said. “In the US, merchants are only set up to handle dollars.”

This could be a major stumbling block to widespread bitcoin acceptance at the point of sale in the US, and critics point to this as a fatal flaw for bitcoins. Still, as Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase pointed out, if you’d told PayPal in 2000 that because their service wasn’t accepted at the local grocery store they were doomed, they’d have laughed at you.

Bitcoins might help push mobile payments into mainstream acceptance because transactions are cheaper and — the panelists, at least, agreed — more secure than traditional payments.

Panelists brushed aside fears of bitcoins being “regulated out of existence.” On the contrary, “The chance of bitcoins being regulated out of existence is the same as the internet being regulated out of existence,” said Tony Gallippi, CEO of BitPay.

At a subsequent panel, however, three of the four venture capitalists on stage agreed that it would be “more than two years” before they would make a major bitcoin investment.