Nestled in the Appalachian Mountains near Marble, North Carolina, there’s a 250,000-square-foot factory building that used to make denim for Levi’s jeans. Starting in the 1960s, Levi Strauss built many plants like this across the American South — and then shuttered almost all of them in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it moved its manufacturing operations overseas. After this North Carolina factory closed in 1999, the building, which sits on 70 acres of land, stood empty for almost two decades. Then the crypto miners came to town.