On August 27, 2020, NullCase published a short announcement titled "Important Dates: Liberty Minecraft is Closing." After five years of operation, the experiment was ending. The game server would go offline in mid-June 2021. The website would follow in 2024. The domain name would expire the year after that.

The announcement was brief, practical, and characteristically understated. There would be no further updates, no backups, no development work. Donations were suspended and August contributions refunded. Players would have nine months to visit the world free of charge.

Please know that I am in good health and that I am happy, my family is well. Nothing of that sort has caused me to close down this project.

Thank you for 5 wonderful years.

Why It Closed

NullCase never reduced the closure to a single cause, but his final essay, "Lessons from Liberty," written weeks before the announcement, reveals the weight of accumulated tensions that led to the decision.

The most philosophical reason was his inability to answer Machiavelli. Throughout his years running the server, NullCase had grappled with Machiavelli's assertion that unarmed prophets are always destroyed -- that persuasion without the ability to compel will ultimately fail. NullCase could demonstrate that the argument was logically self-defeating, but he could not point to a practical alternative that succeeded where Machiavelli predicted failure. His cause, he concluded, "remains hopeless."

I now suppose that I'm not capable enough to achieve those goals, a bitter pill indeed. Given this observation and the costs of operating the project, stopping is the correct response. This however leaves Machiavelli unanswered.

There were practical factors too. Operating the server meant valuing his own time at zero. While Liberty Minecraft never lost money, it never truly paid NullCase for the thousands of hours he invested in writing, administration, development coordination, and community management. He had fought with PayPal for three months over disputes. His personal computer suffered hardware failures that destroyed his work. Each crisis was met and resolved, but the cumulative toll was real.

There was also the matter of a community member operating "under false pretenses" -- what NullCase described in Machiavellian terms as a "foreign power" gaining a "foothold" in the server. Rather than ban them, NullCase chose to step away entirely. He acknowledged that Machiavelli's Romans would never have avoided such a confrontation, and that his decision to quit rather than fight was a departure from the strategic wisdom he had studied.

The Emotional Weight

The closure announcement was businesslike, but the surrounding writings reveal how much the project meant to its creator. Liberty Minecraft had not begun as an abstract experiment. It was born from personal experience with failure and betrayal.

In April 2017, NullCase had written about the server's true origin: VoatCraft, a Minecraft server promoted on the Reddit alternative Voat in late 2015. NullCase had contributed to VoatCraft, designing contraptions and watching a community form. When he asked for evidence that player donations were being used for server expenses, none was provided. Two months in, the server was hacked. Thousands of hours of player work vanished. No backup existed.

The community rallied briefly, but a second server was raised and then abandoned without notice, its operator disappearing with what NullCase estimated was between $1,000 and $3,000 in donations. Players who had been hurt once now felt like fools.

The experience stuck with me. I didn't always get along with everyone on the server -- in some cases it was anything but. Still, I cared about what happened. I know this because month after month I was learning to provide a better option.

When RadioactiveLee, a player whose underwater dome had been destroyed in the VoatCraft hack, later joined Liberty Minecraft, NullCase described it as one of the best moments of the project. The server existed, in part, because NullCase wanted to prove that someone could do it right -- could take donations and spend them transparently, could maintain backups, could build something that lasted.

And he did. For five years.

The Final Months

After the closure announcement, Liberty Minecraft entered a strange twilight. The server remained online, but its operator had stepped back. No updates would be applied. No backups would be performed. NullCase would check periodically that the server was running, but there would be no quick response to outages.

The world itself continued to exist as it was -- Oak Hills with its bustling property market, Valmur with its Norse mythology, the Spawn Strip with its shops and landmarks, Remix's subway tunnels stretching through the earth. Players could visit, build, trade, and explore for nine more months, knowing that none of it would be preserved beyond the shutdown date.

NullCase's final blog post, "Lessons from Liberty," was not a farewell in any sentimental sense. It was a technical document -- a post-mortem of governance, economics, and human behavior, written by someone who had spent five years collecting data from the inside. He discussed conditional property and central authority, the difficulty of exclusion standards, the problem of explaining decisions, and the surprising effectiveness of doing nothing.

He ended with self-deprecation:

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.

What Was Lost

When Liberty Minecraft went offline, a world disappeared. Not just the blocks and buildings -- those were always understood to be temporary, contingent on server hardware and someone paying the hosting bill. What disappeared was the society itself: the property rights system, the Diamond Money economy, the auction markets, the network of towns connected by nether highways and player-built portals, the culture of negotiation and trade that had developed among hundreds of players over half a decade.

The server's Old World had existed since December 2015, accumulating more than 1,000 player-run shops and more than 2.5 million square meters of privately owned land before the New World transition in 2018. The New World had then rebuilt all of that from scratch, producing an even more sophisticated economy. All of it -- every claim, every transaction, every carefully placed block -- existed only as long as the server ran.

NullCase had anticipated this fragility in his final essay, envisioning a future where game data would be stored on cryptographic ledgers, where player accounts would exist outside any single server, and where property would be "unconditional" -- beyond the reach of any operator. That future had not yet arrived.

What Remained

Liberty Minecraft left behind a substantial written archive: years of blog posts, player letters, quarterly reports, economic analyses, and philosophical essays published on libertyminecraft.com. NullCase estimated he had produced over 1,500 hours of writing. The articles for Zeroth Position provided an academic framing of the project. The player letters documented month-by-month economic activity with the specificity of a trade journal.

The plugins developed for the server -- GPRealEstate fixes, GPAuctions, GriefPrevention enhancements -- were released as open-source software, available to anyone running a Minecraft server.

And there was the proof of concept itself. For five years, a virtual society operated under a single rule, with no taxation, no arbitrary rewards, and no government intervention beyond the enforcement of that rule. Property markets functioned. Prices fell as productivity increased. Towns were founded, managed, and sometimes abandoned. Disputes were resolved without violence. Players who broke the rule were removed; everyone else was free. It worked, in the specific sense that NullCase defined: it did not lose money, conflicts were few and small, and sound principles eventually won out.

Whether it answered Machiavelli -- whether an unarmed prophet can do more than survive -- remained, as NullCase acknowledged, an open question. But the experiment ran, and it was recorded, and the record endures.

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