Most of my American friends use Bittrexx and Ionomy to buy Hive. 

Since your friend is new to crypto, I can't say for sure if the person will easily understand exchanges. I think the first thing to do is help your friend understand the basics about the ecosystem and stuff. 

Also, if your friends want low risk, tell them to buy HBD and keep it in savings. High risk incudes Hive and some second layer projects like Leofinance. However, all that depends on their understanding of how the ecosystem as a whole works

The easiest thing to do might be to find someone who is familiar with all of the ins and outs of some of the exchanges and have the people venmo the money to that person and then they can move the Hive there for them.  I would find someone you trust.  Beyond that I think your only option is going to be to buy a major coin on something like Coinbase and then move it to Bittrex where you can trade for Hive and then move the Hive into their account.  I agree, it is way too convoluted.  Depending on how much they are looking to buy, you might run into limit issues.  Either way, if they decide to take that long route, they should start getting their Coinbase and Bittrex accounts set up sooner rather than later because they will need to be verified.  Any of them can reach out to me on Discord or here if they have issues.  I can do my best to help.

I understand the issue here. I'm not an American, I'm living in Russia and have a little issue that I'm solving with VPN. But, since Americans may risk using VPN. Why not to find someone from another country to help them invest in hive. I know that's hard to find someone to trust that much with keys and everything, but for 10% they maybe interested, because they may earn not only HBD 10%, but if the price of HBD go higher in dollar, they may even earn much more in dollar. But, who knows, maybe they have people in other countries they trust to invest for them. In Russia, by the way, I use VPN always to access hive. No application is working here, no front end without VPN. It's crazy how many websites are blocked here. Even linkedin is blocked. Anyway, I hope my idea will help !

**Here are the methods that I know of and have used myself here in USA...**

- - - 

#### Easiest 
1. Download https://www.coinbase.com/ and purchase Litecoin, since it’s fairly quick and doesn’t have high fees. 

 2. Use https://blocktrades.us/en/trade to swap LTC for HBD/HIVE. 

- - - 

### Easy and perhaps discreet

1. Buy LTC with cash at an ATM such as https://coinflip.tech/bitcoin-atm — just need a phone number. Can use a burner number, as long as it can get texts.  

2. Send to your own LTC wallet such as https://www.exodus.com/

2. Swap using BlockTrades, which only requires kyc over a certain amount 

- - - 

### Not as easy, but doable 

1. Buy on Coinbase or from CoinFlip

2. Send to Exodus, then Ionomy... if they are savvy, send straight to Ionomy from Coinbase/CoinFlip.  

3. Withdraw from Ionomy to Hive account after finished trading. No limit or kyc on Ionomy yet, (no idea how, but it works).

- - - 

**Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions.**

I've known you for a long time, my friend, because you've been here for a long time. I am surprised that a person earning a lot of hive does not know how the hive community works. You are not really interested in the community and are you just looking at yourself? You don't know how the hive ecosystem works? Sorry for honesty.

This might help.

https://hive.blog/hive/@qsett/how-to-buy-hive-on-binance-exchange-video

What about having them use something like Cash app or Coinbase to buy Bitcoin and then send Bitcoin to be converted by Blocktrades, SimpleSwap or StealthEx? Peakd has links to SimpleSwap and StealthEx in your wallet under the Exchanges side. 

All one needs to do is to buy HBD on the exchange sites like Binance, then send to HIVE wallet/account. I think I have got interest from HBD just one time 🙄