(the image is published with permission to use here @desic.creative/hive-and-hbd-3d-coins-in-the-form-of-gifs-monedas-3d-hive-y-hbd-en-forma-de-gifs)

Converting from pesos to Hive dollars is costly. A couple of years ago, I looked at the steps I would go through in order to convert a quantity of pesos into HBD and found that it involved at least two exchanges and then we would end up with a 5% loss of the investment converting into HBD and then another 5% getting it out.

There are several ways of getting into HBD from ARS in Argentina. With the 20% APR of Hive dollars in savings, you could leave it in savings for six months and then cash out the same dollar amount. If you remove it before then, you lose money. If you remove it after, you earn money. A year compounds to about 20% and the 10% loss for conversion is absorbed and you end up with a 10% gain.

Fiat to Crypto

Generally there is no centralized exchange that will trade ARS for HBD directly. You cannot even buy Hive directly with argentine pesos. You will need to go into some other crypto-currency outside of the Hive blockchain first as a bridge currency. You can trade HBD for Hive and then Hive for some more popular crypto currency.

• Ripio has BTC, litecoin, USDC coin (which chain), DAI, Dodgecoin, Aave, and Tron, Ada, Dot, Matic and TUSD (tether).
• Satoshi Tango
  has BTC, BCH (the real bitcoin), ETH, LTC, Dogecoin, Ada, USDC, USDT, and DAI.
• ArgenBTC has BTC, Eth, USDT, and Dai
• Some Hive user in Argentina who will trade HBD for ARS via bank account
• Some Hive user within a close drive away who will trade with you with cash.

Crypto to Hive

So you need another international exchange that carries Hive or HBD but also includes one of these coins above except that we want to have low fee coins. So that leaves BCH, LTC, Ada, and Dogecoin. You'll have to read the agreements of the exchanges, and decide if you want to agree with them. if you don't you can just keep shopping for a pair of exchanges that works for you. You'll probably need to do some kind of KYC.

On Satoshi Tango, this centralized exchanges have a buy and sell price difference of 3% for nearly all of the currency pairs. However with stable-coins this is much cheaper with 1.4%-1.5% difference between the buy/sell price for DAI, USDC and USDT. Previously I recommended using LTC as the bridge currency. Now, I'd say this difference makes it worthwhile to use these stable coins. You must ensure the receiving exchange is expecting the same currency on the same chain as the sending exchange. For example, don't try to send USDC on Polygon from one exchange to a BSC address, or a Tron address. It must be the same currency on the same chain.

Send the Hive to your account and then trade the Hive for Hive dollars. So if you start out with $99,500 ARS today worth $100.00 USD. Then you send it to Satoshi Tango and buy DAI on Polygon (not DAI but DAI on Polygon). You could get $94.67 DAI (on Polygon) but you'll need some Matic. Hopefully you have some Matic, and that should be a small amount, but say you have some and for accounting purposes lets say it costs us 0.27 DAI worth of Matic and with the withdraw fee you lose another 0.20 DAI withdrawing it.

So you have $94.20 DAI instead. Now you can send both of those to your Polygon wallet, only to send it again to the other exchange. It is not recommended to send directly to another exchange. At the other exchange you sell the $94.20 DAI for Hive directly if possible. Looking at Simple Swap, this is 238.967 Hive. Currently 1 Hive is worth 0.391828 HBD. That is 93.63 HBD.

From DAI to Hive

So now, it looks like we lost over 6% ONE WAY but later we will see this is still nearly 97 USD worth of of funds. Now, I looked at converting this amount back into DAI and found the spread should be about 2.8% except that it wont trade this amount. You see SimpleSwap has a minimum trade of 270 Hive. Go figure. So, take $100 USD as a reference value. If you get an exchange like what you get on SimpleSwap without that minimum you end up with 93.63 HBD (after trading on the internal market). It only looks like you lost 6%, but if you go the other direction and it might be better or worse. Converting back to Hive: 236.57 Hive. Then from Hive to DAI. 91.00 DAI. Then from DAI back to pesos: 93,433 ARS. The value at the end is worth 93.9% of what you put in. This is 6.1% lost. It looked really bad because the stable-coin dollars are overvalued above the dollar blue price.

Summary

That is a marked improvement. You minimum investment should be at least $130 USD worth because of this arbitrary limit for transferring Hive on the bridge exchange. However, you only need to leave it in savings to recover the loss that you occur when trading into and trading out of it for four months. With $130 USD worth of pesos you will end up with 148 USD in 12 months if you put them in savings and leave them there.

The cost of trading between ARS (pesos) and HBD has gone down thanks to stable coins on Ethereum clones.