I've never hidden the fact that I've worked for IVPN and Restore Privacy. But they pay me by the word, so I gain nothing by promoting them.
I haven't actually used Orchid, because there's no Linux app. But I did buy some of their Etherium currency. And I recall no money trail. As I recall, I converted well-mixed ~anonymous Bitcoin to plain-vanilla Etherium, and then to Orchid's currency.
But whatever, I'm not going to defend Orchid.
Anyway, I use nested VPN chains. It's like a multihop VPN, except that each hop is a different VPN service, and each of them is leased with a different pool of well-mixed Bitcoin. I do all the Bitcoin mixing via Tor, in Whonix instances. That way, I don't need to trust any of them, only that an adversary won't manage to compromise or coerce all of them. It's the same logic as Tor uses, based on Chaum.
If you want to read more, just search "mirimir" on IVPN's and Restore Privacy's sites. There's also https://github.com/mirimir/vpnchains which is pretty over the top. And I've also played with something like that which routes VPNs via Tor.
I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency so I can't say how well you managed to anonymize the paytrail but the problem of logs and the lifetime of the chain concerns me.
When you start to chain VPN nodes you gain latency so you might as well use Tor. These days Tor has enough bandwidth to play 720p video with ease and there's less hassle. Also once you hit three modes you won't really benefit from longer chain so mixing VPN with Tor isn't really beneficial unless you're evading censorship of Tor.
OK, fair enough. I'm no expert on Orchid. I rather lost interest, after it became clear that it was useless to me.
You're wrong about nested VPN chains, however. Depending on geographical distribution, each VPN adds 50-100 msec rtt. And bandwidth doesn't drop that much after the first VPN.
I use both nested VPN chains and Tor to mitigate the risk of Tor circuits being compromised. The lesson of CMU's "relay early" exploit for the FBI was sobering. Given that lesson, only fools use Tor without protection.
I haven't actually used Orchid, because there's no Linux app. But I did buy some of their Etherium currency. And I recall no money trail. As I recall, I converted well-mixed ~anonymous Bitcoin to plain-vanilla Etherium, and then to Orchid's currency.
But whatever, I'm not going to defend Orchid.
Anyway, I use nested VPN chains. It's like a multihop VPN, except that each hop is a different VPN service, and each of them is leased with a different pool of well-mixed Bitcoin. I do all the Bitcoin mixing via Tor, in Whonix instances. That way, I don't need to trust any of them, only that an adversary won't manage to compromise or coerce all of them. It's the same logic as Tor uses, based on Chaum.
If you want to read more, just search "mirimir" on IVPN's and Restore Privacy's sites. There's also https://github.com/mirimir/vpnchains which is pretty over the top. And I've also played with something like that which routes VPNs via Tor.