Do they not accept credit cards?
Discussion
They do, but when you pay with a card you get charged the “official" government manipulated exchange rate. When you get out money via Western Union you get the exchange rate called Blue Dollar, which reflects the actual value of the Argentinian Peso (or lack there of)
Fiat is so complicated. What would you estimate difference is when paying by card? 10% more expensive?
Of course you can use credit cards, but the credit card here take dollar value to the official value, and that’s half the value of the dollar in the “black market” or the street. So instead of $152 for this dinner you pay around $300. That’s why you sell dollars in the black market to have cash.
Crazy. I wonder why the official exchange rate “needs” to be different. Are you able to pay with BTC in a black market sort of way?
I’m not an expert, but it’s a way to try to control the dollar value, if you go to the bank, you can buy just $200 to the official value in theory, but there’s a lot of restrictions, so not everybody can buy those $200, by example, if you receive any kind of help from the government you can’t buy that dollar. And, if you can buy that $200, you have to add 65% of taxes, so it’s not that value anyway. And fixed deposits gives you around 154% APY in pesos, so that’s another government measure to try to avoid you to buy dollars. And it’s more complex than this 😢