Does it make more sense to store the coordinates for a single cube in a VBO and use camera translation/rotation to place each block in its proper place on the map, or does it make more sense to store the entire map in a VBO and just draw from that?
It’s not a minecraft clone, but it is a 3rd person top-down camera angle world that builds terrain from cubes
Simply taking the question at face-value, it seems to me the OP is considering a multi-pass render scheme vs rendering large amounts of geometry using VBOs.
If this is correct, then rendering large amounts of geometry will win over a multi-pass rendering scheme. Of course, the correct way to efficiently render many cubes is to batch them by material(s) and perform instanced rendering.