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“why they felt the anonymous VPN operator was more trustworthy than a regulated ISP”: - the VPN operator has never had an employee visit your home. - the VPN operator did not require any type of credit check and/or require extensive personal information. - the barriers to change VPN operator are substantially lower.

I’m not a huge fan of the VPN operators, but there are real differences in the trust required with each.

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You not giving any personal data to Mullvad, only sending Bitcoin, doesn't really change that they can still potentially see any of your traffic entering and exiting their infrastructure, to include being able to connect your residential IP to a currently active session.

Tor isn't much better, as security services have been able to gain enough control or surveillance ability to match traffic as it ingresses and egresses Tor, to then identify where the traffic originated from.

With enough of a tinfoil hat you can perpetually be paranoid and chasing "anonymity" for a long while. It's really about what you're trying to conceal and what effort you put in to securing the infrastructure at the beginning and end of an end-to-end encrypted session, as well as the level of security of the end-to-end encrypted session itself.

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