content: No, it won't "destroy the point of anonymity".  It adds complexity, but it's a definite improvement. When choosing a service provider, you want one that you supposedly can trust - but that's blind stupidity. There are popular VPNs that make various claims, but they just have more to lose when pressured by government thugs. And you don't know if you can trust some guy in some small country with a fiber line and a server rack in his basement offering easy VPN services for Bitcoin. The goal is: don't trust anyone. The solution is to use server relays over which you have maximum control, and to use more than one. Compartmentalize, so the underlings don't know who they serve or what they do! Let's say you rent two $5/month virtual private servers, one in the Netherlands and one in Russia. They can be tiny basement businesses, among many thousands. They don't know anything about you as a person, only that you send them crypto-coin every X days for their services. (Means of avoiding traceability with digital currency transactions are explained elsewhere.) At a moment notice can add / switch to a virtual server relay in Iceland, Switzerland, Malaysia, Jordan, Brazil, etc.   From the perspective of your government-loving ISP (and all hops between you and the first relay server), it's the same encrypted transport / network layer stream as with let's say NordVPN. The benefit is that, if they want to spy on you, they probably have NordVPN/etc on speed-dial, but not the thousands of virtual server providers all over the world.  It would take time to track down any one of them through that country's court system, if they cooperate with "your government" at all.  Or, even better, you can tunnel VPN traffic through something that looks like a video feed, etc, so your ISP doesn't even know it's a VPN.   From the perspective of the first relay server, it only knows the IP addresses of your ISP and your next relay server. They have an encrypted virtual machine image on their disk that's getting and sending encrypted traffic, and they won't learn the full story analyzing the RAM.   If you have relay servers in the middle, they know least of all.   From the perspective of the last relay server, they know the destination IPs of your traffic (which must also have application-level encryption like SSL or SSH). If the sites you talk to that have your information are secure, the relays don't know anything about you or your end of the communication.   From the perspective of the sites you connect to, they think the last relay server is your IP. You can add additional obfuscation by cycling exit nodes, which can be easily done by adding Tor as the final stop of the journey.