Some of the articles on here discuss the problems with bitshares http://prestonbyrne.com/back-of-the-envelope/
Serious replies appreciated!
Counterparty separates itself from scams by not being a scam. If there is ever government action in the 2.0 space, Counterparty sits head and shoulders above other projects as there were no funds raised (no IPO). It's worth noting that Counterparty is an open, agnostic platform. Legislation and regulation will occur jurisdiction by jurisdiction while Counterparty is available world wide.
Also, we kind of touched on this in recent posts, but it's worth noting that Counterparty's development team is crushing everyone else. Perhaps I'm wrong and it's somehow a close race between Counterparty and other project devs (if it were even a competition). Even so, we're sitting on devs that are funding our project completely out of their pockets as they work on it full-time (giving them a significantly higher cost per XCP than everyone else). That, above all else, makes me confident in the future of Counterparty. They know what the road map is better than anyone else and they, as intelligent, informed individuals, are continuing to dump time and money into a quickly moving project that appears to be accelerating.