Liberty Minecraft's economy ran on diamonds. Not as an arbitrary game mechanic, but as a deliberate implementation of sound money principles drawn from Austrian economics. Diamonds were scarce, durable, fungible, intrinsically useful, and -- crucially -- no central authority could print more of them. Every unit of currency in the Liberty Minecraft economy was mined from the ground by a real player, making the server's monetary system arguably more honest than any national currency in the real world.

How the Money Worked

The monetary system was built on a fixed conversion rate between diamonds and dollars, though the specific rate changed between the server's two eras.

In the Old World (December 2015 through early 2019):

1 Diamond = $1,000 = 50 Claim Blocks (at $20 each)

In the New World (launched August 31, 2018):

1 Diamond = $10,000 = 100 Claim Blocks (at $100 each)

Players could convert physical diamonds into digital currency at the Diamond Exchange near Spawn. No fee or tax was charged. The conversion was fully reversible -- dollars could be exchanged back into diamonds at the same rate, and dollars could be converted into claim blocks used to claim land.

There were only two ways to obtain money: create it by mining diamonds and converting them, or earn it through trade with other players. NullCase described the simplicity of this system with evident satisfaction:

All of the money that exists in the world is Diamonds. Diamonds which are discovered and mined in our world by real players. All prices are expressed in terms of Diamonds, except for barter.

Money could be used in four ways: sold (traded for goods), given (transferred to another player), exchanged (converted back to diamonds or claim blocks), or destroyed. That last option was literal -- converting money into a physical diamond and throwing it into lava removed it from the economy permanently.

The Redenomination

When the New World launched in August 2018, NullCase increased the diamond conversion rate tenfold -- from $1,000 to $10,000 per diamond. This was not inflation. No new purchasing power was created. The change was a redenomination designed to make small transactions more practical. Under the Old World rate, the smallest possible price was one dollar, which represented one-thousandth of a diamond. Under the New World rate, one dollar represented one ten-thousandth of a diamond, giving the economy ten times more granularity for pricing low-value goods.

The claim block price was adjusted proportionally, from $20 to $100, preserving the real cost: one diamond still purchased exactly 50 claim blocks in both eras. The redenomination changed the numbers on price tags without changing the underlying economics.

Why Diamonds

NullCase chose diamonds because they met the classical requirements of sound money:

Sound money must be intrinsically valuable, durable, stable, scarce, divisible, fungible, portable, and more. The bar is set high, as it should be.

Diamonds in Minecraft are intrinsically valuable -- they craft the best tools and armor in the game. They are scarce, generated in limited quantities by the world's terrain. They are durable, not consumed by use as currency. And unlike gold (another candidate), diamonds could not be inflated through automated farms. NullCase noted that Minecraft gold was unsuitable precisely because it could be mass-produced, violating the scarcity requirement.

The one property diamonds naturally lacked was divisibility. A single diamond was too valuable for small transactions. NullCase solved this by splitting each diamond into dollar units, providing the granularity needed for everyday commerce. The New World's 10x redenomination further improved this divisibility. For very small transactions, players historically used gold ingots or nuggets, though these were acknowledged as inferior money.

The Money Supply

The total money supply in Liberty Minecraft was determined entirely by player activity. Every diamond that would ever exist was already embedded in the world's terrain, waiting to be mined. No central bank could expand or contract the supply. No server operator could print money. The supply grew only as players invested labor in mining.

Old World Money Supply

NullCase initially described the Old World's monetary system as disinflationary -- one where the rate of new money entering the economy would slow over time as easily accessible diamonds were exhausted. However, during the Old World era, the system also awarded claim blocks based on playtime, which functioned as a form of money creation outside of diamond mining. NullCase identified this as a flaw and corrected it, but the Old World had operated with this distortion for roughly its first 10,000 hours of aggregate play.

New World Money Supply

The New World eliminated all forms of money creation except diamond mining. There were no playtime-based rewards, no arbitrary handouts, no universal basic income. There was one path to wealth: providing value in exchange.

What happened next was remarkable. Between August 2018 and August 2019, players expanded the money supply by 771.76% -- entirely through voluntary mining activity, with no centralized production whatsoever. At the same time, purchasing power was increasing by an estimated 1,000-10,000% per year as production and innovation drove prices down.

Subjective Value and Rothbard's Error

NullCase used Liberty Minecraft's economy as a laboratory to test economic theories, and he was not afraid to challenge even his intellectual heroes. In a detailed analysis, he took on Murray Rothbard's 1987 assertion that increasing purchasing power reduces the demand for money:

Rothbard's assertion in June 1987 was that a high purchasing power for money reduces demand for money. He says that higher purchasing power means a person requires less Money to achieve the same amount of buying, so their demand from day-to-day is reduced.

NullCase argued that Rothbard conflated how much money a person uses with how much they demand. Using a water analogy, he made the distinction vivid:

If one supposes that I use no water tomorrow; suppose that the purchasing power of water on the market was skyrocketing [...] one would not conclude that demand for water was falling. Instead, one might argue that its utility as a medium of exchange was skyrocketing with the price.

The core insight was that higher purchasing power reduces the cost of producing money (because labor and other factors of production become cheaper in real terms), which increases the incentive to mine more diamonds. The money supply expands naturally through market forces:

An increase in purchasing power is an increase in demand for money. People want money that's strong and will tend to dump money that's losing value fast. When production of money can be expanded on the market an increase in purchasing power will lead to a higher production of money. A free market naturally expands the money supply, and for its own reasons, and no intervention is required for this to happen.

NullCase was careful to credit Rothbard where due -- the Austrian economist was correct that government inflation is unnecessary and fraudulent. But by observing a functioning free-market economy directly, NullCase could see dynamics that Rothbard, working only from theory, had missed.

Rothbard was not afforded such a luxury.

The Question of Two Economies

NullCase also explored whether Liberty Minecraft could be used to test Austrian Business Cycle Theory directly. Inspired by work from Walter Block and others on how credit expansion in one country affects a neighboring country with sound money, he proposed creating two linked worlds with separate currencies -- one maintaining full diamond reserves, the other abandoning them at a set point in the experiment.

Unlike government funded research, a year long experiment can be fully funded for about $1000. This would pay for server costs and some development work. All trade activity can easily be logged on both worlds.

The proposal illustrated NullCase's broader vision for Liberty Minecraft: not just a game server with an interesting economy, but a genuine testing ground for economic theories that could not be ethically or practically tested in the real world.

Sound Money and the One Rule

The monetary system was a direct expression of the one rule -- resolve nonviolent disputes nonviolently. In a system where theft and coercion are prohibited, every transaction is voluntary. Every dollar earned represents value created for another person. There was no taxation, no inflation tax, no redistribution. The money was as honest as the principle that generated it.

NullCase saw this as more than a technical achievement. It was proof that a functioning monetary system could emerge from first principles without central planning:

Every dollar in our economy was produced honestly. The only way players become rich in Liberty Minecraft is by making other people better off.

The diamond standard was not a nostalgic callback to the gold standard. It was a demonstration that when money is scarce, fungible, and produced only through labor, and when trade is free and voluntary, an economy organizes itself with remarkable efficiency -- and no central authority is required to make it work.

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