There is no direct reason why proxies would be so bad apart from being slower than yo gramma on ya old man.
A daisy chain would increase the odds no matter how you put it.
Trusting a randomly popped box is about as bad as anyone providing VPN services, probably still better than trusting an ISP.
Since you can nest some layers of encryption on the traffic it is all about the routing you would like to keep secret.
In a way a VPN leads right back to you since you pay for it and directly connect to them which an ISP knows.
Its all about who can keep a secret I guess.
Comparing time stamps on the traffic could lead to an easy match, would require control of the hops and who is granted this acces remains a question.
Let me explain for them noobies:
Hop VPN etc.
You ---- N --- V --- N-- Server
Traffic will cross over the first hop which could be tapped and a time stamp is recorded for every packet.
If the second node is also 'tapped' you could do the same and match the client / server timestamps.
This does not mean anyone can look into the data just like that but it can be enough to give away a person.
This is theoretical in nature but perfectly feasible.
