Private property was not an afterthought in Liberty Minecraft -- it was the mechanism through which the one rule became a functioning society. NullCase defined property rights using computer code rather than social agreements, administrative rules, or honor systems. The server's land claim plugin enforced ownership at the technical level: if you did not have permission to interact with a claim, the server simply would not let you. This made property rights as close to absolute as any digital system could achieve.

The Five Types of Property

Liberty Minecraft recognized five distinct categories of private property, each with its own rules for creation, ownership, and abandonment.

Inventory

Items held on a player's character, stored in an Ender Chest, or placed within their land claims constituted inventory. Ownership was created the moment a player picked up an item. Items could be abandoned by dropping them, dying (which scattered inventory), or placing them in containers on unclaimed or another player's land. Items held on a character or in an Ender Chest could never be lost to inactivity.

Cash Balance

Players could convert diamonds into cash at the Diamond Exchange. Once converted, a cash balance was permanent property that did not decay with inactivity. This distinction mattered -- a player who left the server for months would lose land claims but never lose their money.

Claim Blocks

Claim blocks were purchased with cash and could be used to stake territory. They could also be sold back at a fixed rate. Like cash, claim blocks held as property did not vanish due to inactivity. If a player's claim expired, the spent blocks were returned to them. The price of claim blocks changed between eras: $20 each in the Old World, rising to $100 each in the New World after the 10x redenomination.

Pets

Tamed animals -- horses, cats, dogs -- were recognized as property. NullCase noted that pets persisted indefinitely regardless of a player's activity, though he intended to eventually bring them under the same inactivity rules as land claims.

Land Claims

The most consequential form of property. Land claims encompassed everything within their boundaries up to the build limit: buildings, trees, dirt, water, untamed animals, boats. NullCase described the rights as follows:

You have the exclusive right to decide how your property is used within Liberty Minecraft. No one can use your property unless you first permit it -- by intention or dereliction.

How land claims expired, however, changed dramatically between the Old World and the New World.

Evolution of Property Rights

The property system underwent a fundamental transformation when Liberty Minecraft transitioned from its Old World (December 2015 through early 2019, running Minecraft 1.11-1.12) to the New World (launched August 31, 2018, running Minecraft 1.13 onward).

Old World Claim Expiration

In the Old World, claim expiration was tied to a player's rank, which was earned through playtime. Temporary claims expired after 28 days of inactivity at the default rank, extending to 60 days at higher ranks. A player who had purchased at least one million dollars in claim blocks -- equivalent to 50,000 claim blocks at $20 each, or 1,000 diamonds -- could make their claims permanent. Permanent claims never expired regardless of how long the owner was absent.

This system created a class of entrenched landowners whose claims persisted indefinitely, sometimes degrading server performance and locking up valuable territory. It also meant that wealth could buy immunity from the inactivity rules that applied to everyone else.

New World Claim Expiration

The New World eliminated both the rank system and permanent claims entirely. NullCase was explicit about why:

An arbitrary duration of play will not determine whether you are rewarded.

Under the New World rules, all claims expired after 60 days of inactivity, regardless of how much a player had invested. No amount of wealth could make a claim permanent. The only exception was for subscribers ($5 per month), whose expiration timer was paused while their subscription was active. Non-subscribers faced the universal 60-day countdown.

When claims expired in the New World, they were not simply released back into the wild. The GPAuctions plugin, developed specifically for this era, auctioned expired claims over a one-week bidding period. The proceeds were deposited into the original owner's cash balance, ensuring that even absent players were compensated at market rates for what they had built.

This was a deliberate philosophical shift. In the Old World, wealth could buy permanence. In the New World, all property required ongoing stewardship -- or it returned to the market.

Property Defined by Code

The philosophical significance of defining property through code rather than rules cannot be overstated. On most Minecraft servers, "no griefing" is a rule enforced by moderators who review complaints after the fact. In Liberty Minecraft, griefing within a claim was simply impossible -- the server would not permit it. This meant property rights were not dependent on NullCase's availability, judgment, or consistency. They were deterministic.

In Liberty Minecraft, private property is defined by computer code. As defined, you have the exclusive right to decide how your property is used within Liberty Minecraft.

This approach had consequences that extended beyond mere protection. Because property was code-enforced, players could grant fine-grained permissions to others. A landowner could allow specific players to build on their land, creating subclaims with different permission sets. This enabled towns, shared workspaces, and commercial districts without requiring any central authority to mediate access.

The Five-Month Experiment

NullCase's commitment to testing ideas empirically led to one of Liberty Minecraft's most striking demonstrations. In early 2017, during the Old World era, he identified two equally beautiful, mountainous areas of the map -- the kind of natural landscapes often selected for nature preserves or public parks. One area was opened with normal private property rules. The other was claimed entirely by NullCase and then granted to everyone -- communal ownership where any player could build, modify, or harvest anything.

Socialism is a theory which proposes that the means of production, distribution, and trade can and ought to be owned collectively. I propose to answer the following questions: When everyone has ownership of the land and its goods, what will that area come to produce? What infrastructure will be created there to distribute its products? How will one engage in trade for that which everyone owns?

NullCase framed the experiment with characteristic directness:

Some people believe that Socialism is the way to a better world. I believe they are wrong, but I also believe in testing my ideas.

After five months, the results were visually stark. The privately owned area had developed into a functioning settlement with buildings, infrastructure, and economic activity. The communally owned area had been stripped and degraded -- the tragedy of the commons made visible in a side-by-side comparison. NullCase published the results and let the test continue indefinitely.

The experiment did not prove that communal ownership always fails. But it demonstrated, under controlled conditions within a digital world, that the introduction of private property produced dramatically different outcomes than its absence -- outcomes that aligned with the predictions of Austrian economics.

Absolute Property Rights

NullCase's position on property rights was uncompromising. Property owners could do whatever they wished with their land. They could build, demolish, restrict access, charge tolls, set local rules, or leave it entirely vacant. There was no zoning, no building codes, no aesthetic standards imposed from above.

This absolutism extended to intellectual property, which NullCase rejected:

I don't believe in intellectual property because it's an attempt to restrict by violence the peaceful actions of property owners. It's unjustifiable to do that, so I don't bother.

When a player named Tender002 purchased a house built by Freeaboo and then put up a sign appearing to take credit for the design, the dispute resolved itself without any intellectual property enforcement. This incident occurred in the New World era. Freeaboo expressed displeasure, Tender002 clarified his sign, and the matter was settled. NullCase noted that even if Tender002 had been less accommodating, the market would have adjusted -- Freeaboo would learn to price in the risk of imitators:

If Tender002 were less accommodating? Then, he would have taught Freeaboo something valuable. Freeaboo might choose to raise his prices to pay for the discomfort he'll receive when someone really does take the credit for his ideas.

Property and the One Rule

The relationship between property and the one rule -- resolve nonviolent disputes nonviolently -- was circular in the best sense. The rule made property rights possible by prohibiting theft and coercion. Property rights in turn gave the rule substance by creating something worth protecting. Without property, the rule would have been an abstraction. Without the rule, property would have been a contest of force.

NullCase saw this interdependence clearly. Property ownership within Liberty Minecraft was not a privilege granted by the server operator -- it was a logical consequence of the foundational principle. If nonviolent disputes must be resolved nonviolently, then taking someone's possessions by force is impermissible. If taking possessions by force is impermissible, then property rights exist. The code simply made this logic executable.

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