BlockScan has opened up a bitpay-like invoice portal for merchants wishing to accept counterparty assets & POS applications.(both alphabetical and free to create numerical assets are supported)
Currently in tech preview (alpha stage) for review by market participants.
http://pay.blockscan.com/Something like this makes it possible for any entity who decides to act as their own voucher issuer on the CounterParty network, (offering discounts/coupons or memberships) a very low barrier to entry to accepting those vouchers on their sites. They can also be trustlessly traded amongst users via the decentralised exchange without risk of hacks/forgery. It is trivial to track ownership of these vouchers on the bitcoin blockchain and they cannot be double-spent.
A gateway issuer (Any exchange or trusted entity) could in theory establish a ripple-like vending machine gateway on the counterparty network , so you convert fiat to fiat-backed counterparty assets, then you are free to trade USD/EURO/GBP/RMB etc on the decentralised exchange trustlessly, with automatic escrowing by the counterparty protocol. Any merchant could accept those currencies on their sites. Crucially the user would always be storing their funds under their
own private keys so no fractional reserve shenanigans, (and they can easily store whatever assets they hold on a normal address generated by electrum or bitcoin-qt, paper wallets, armory cold storage etc )
if a user stored funds in this manner they wouldn't have to worry about the volatility of the btc token or dealing with sending back and forth to centralised exchanges. Of course this means they can also be secured by multi-sig '2fa' or via ledgerwallet or another hardware signing mechanism as those features are now live on counterparty main-net. It's not without risk at all since you still need to be assured the guarantor has adequate holdings of whatever fiat token they would be issuing but it;s a step in the right direction after over a million BTC has already been stolen/hacked/siphoned from centralised single-point of failure exchanges..
Comments, suggestions and general feedback are welcome, as well as ideas for potential use-cases.