In September 2020, as Liberty Minecraft approached its final months, NullCase published what he called his last planned post -- a candid and sometimes uncomfortable accounting of five years running a free society inside a video game. The piece mixed hard-won operational wisdom with philosophical loose ends, personal admissions, and the kind of honesty that comes from someone who no longer needs to worry about upsetting readers. It is among the most revealing documents in the Liberty Minecraft archive.

As a disclaimer, these lessons are prepared by someone that decided their best option to explore a free society was to make a Minecraft server. I'm not a genius billionaire with a high social IQ. Anyways, I genuinely tried to do a good job here.

The Problems That Remained

Conditional Property and Central Authority

The most fundamental unsolved problem was one NullCase had wrestled with throughout the project: every Minecraft server has a central authority. The operator generates resources, has custody of player property, and can make arbitrary decisions. NullCase acknowledged this plainly:

Central authority exists at multiple levels. All of them can be addressed by existing technology, but it hasn't happened yet. Today operators generate resources and have custody of your property. A malicious or incompetent operator may inflate game resources or use your property without your consent.

His proposed solution was forward-looking: the next generation of games would store data on cryptographic ledgers, transforming operators from custodians into hosts. Game items would become what he called "cryptomodities" -- scarce, useful within the game, but secured privately by the player and beyond the host's reach.

Players accounts will exist outside the game so that players don't have to trust you as an operator/host. Their property will be unconditional.

This vision -- where property is truly unconditional rather than conditional on the operator's good behavior -- represented the logical endpoint of the Liberty Minecraft philosophy. NullCase considered it achievable but expensive, and he did not live to see it implemented.

Cultural Norms and Bad Neighbors

The one rule -- resolve nonviolent disputes nonviolently -- was deliberately minimal. It established a floor for conduct but said nothing about noise, aesthetics, courtesy, or the thousand small frictions that arise when people live near each other. Players with strong cultural values often struggled to impose those values within their own communities:

Players with strong cultural values often struggled to take ownership of that problem when designing their bases or towns. They would usually permit anyone to live next to them, occasionally resulting in bad neighbors which they had no power to evict. Tension between neighbors lasted years.

NullCase considered two approaches. His own was to create what David Friedman called "subcities" -- allowing competing mini-cultures to develop within the server's single-rule framework. The alternative was to impose cultural norms at the server level, which was more common across Minecraft but carried far higher risk:

It's like betting everything on one horse all the time, a pure strategy for failure. Instead I decided to own the race track.

Enforcing the Rule Against Those Who Reject It

When a player rejected the one rule and was subsequently banned, the resulting conflict followed a predictable pattern. The banned player could not mount a credible argument -- their position was self-contradicting -- but that did not matter, because their strategy was emotional rather than rational:

The reject is unlikely to understand or will have strategic reasons to feign confusion when they are banned. Their pure winning strategy is deception and outrage because they have long since abandoned reason.

NullCase found this dynamic costly and never fully resolved it.

The Cost of Explanation

Players wanted decisions explained. NullCase tried to provide explanations. It rarely went well:

On occasions where I have tried to explain players still seem to be dissatisfied. If you are honest they often have far more questions.

He attributed this to misaligned incentives: the operator has the strongest incentive to understand the rules but the weakest incentive to spend time explaining them; players have a lower incentive to understand but a strong incentive to worry about how decisions affect them personally.

Surprises

The Feeling of Power

NullCase was startled to discover that running even a small community in a video game produced a disconcerting sense of power:

It's hard to imagine that being lord over a small community on a silly game would give someone the feeling of power. Thinking that way is probably why I was surprised. It's a little embarrassing too, because it's exciting and this reaction, my reaction was disturbing to me.

When I banned someone for breaking the rule I felt good. I can only imagine that this problem is much worse for people with power outside of a virtual world. Sticking to my one rule definitely helped keep me in line.

Libertarians Asking for State Interventions

One of the more ironic findings was that self-described libertarians were not immune to demanding interventions that contradicted their stated beliefs:

In practice libertarians have advocated for theft, money printing, price controls, and property violations. They might expect you to subsidize foolish behavior. They will ask you to deny reality as a means to create a more realistic simulation.

NullCase noted that while libertarians were generally pleasant community members, they would often double down when the contradictions in their proposals were pointed out.

What Worked

Sound Money Exceeded Expectations

The diamond-based monetary system produced results that surprised even NullCase:

Our players enjoyed a one hundred fold increase in purchasing power almost every year. Never at any time in my life was such an opportunity possible, except in this digital world. It was wonderful.

The appreciation was so rapid that NullCase never needed to tax. He could pay players from his own funds for testing and development, paying less in nominal terms each year while giving more in real terms. Working for basic food and shelter became so easy that new types of work emerged.

Doing Nothing

Inspired by Lao Tzu, NullCase discovered that inaction was often the most effective governance strategy. When problems arose, waiting for the community to recognize and respond to them produced better outcomes than early intervention:

If you have a problem with a player's behavior, most often it is better to do nothing until their actions are widely known. Your community will chastise them which may solve the problem OR the problem will become bad enough that no one complains when the disruptive player is banned.

He noted a painful corollary: solving problems before anyone noticed earned no credit and sometimes provoked resistance. The community rewarded his slowness to act.

When a difficult problem was solved well before anyone recognized it, no one cared and no rewards followed.

One Rule Was Enough

Despite all the complications, the one rule proved sufficient. Conflicts were few and small. The main source of friction -- bad neighbors with incompatible preferences -- fell outside the rule's scope but was being addressed by market forces as players gradually bought land for the purpose of establishing community standards.

More often than not, if a player was banned for violating the rule I would hear from members of our community that they were already a difficult person to deal with for other reasons.

The Shadow of Machiavelli

The most philosophically fraught passage in NullCase's farewell dealt with Machiavelli. NullCase admitted to being "haunted" by certain assertions in The Prince, particularly the claim that unarmed prophets are always destroyed while armed prophets conquer:

I am haunted by some of Machiavelli's assertions, particularly where I've failed to create successful alternatives. I will say to myself that "he cannot be right because the argument disproves itself, and it's trivial to demonstrate." All this is true, but does it matter if no alternative path yet exists?

He acknowledged that he had allowed a destructive influence to gain a foothold in the community and ultimately chose to shut down rather than confront it -- something Machiavelli's Romans would never have done. This failure weighed on him, even as he maintained that Machiavelli's reliance on force was self-defeating in principle.

Protection Services and the Stateless Society

Earlier in the project's life, NullCase had explored whether Liberty Minecraft's property protection model could say anything about how protection services might work in a real stateless society. He concluded that his role as server operator was not a state monopoly because participation was voluntary, players could download their property and leave, and anyone could compete with him by setting up their own server.

To be a State monopoly, the service would have to be required by force. My service is voluntary.

He sketched two models for real-world stateless protection: a distributed society where property owners live under a common banner and receive protection services across a geographic area, and a private city where a single owner provides protection within defined borders. Each had tradeoffs in capital requirements, defensibility, and risk.

The Final Accounting

NullCase's closing was characteristically self-deprecating:

I was much sharper when I started this project. At least, that's how I remember it. Over the last 5 years I've come to realize that I'm kind of an idiot. The strategy I used to run Liberty Minecraft was well suited to me. For this reason alone you might want to do something different.

The project survived five years without losing money, though NullCase valued his own time at zero. It produced genuine economic phenomena, tested real theories, and created a community that functioned under a single ethical principle. Whether it proved anything about the viability of free societies remained, in NullCase's own estimation, an open question -- but one worth having asked.

A bitter pill is not meant for chewing. Put simply, my one rule and the server configuration are a poor way for me to say anything general about ethics or economics because no one cares. They do offer a great way to run a Minecraft server.