The main advantage of buying and holding is that it is simple and straightforward.
Looks can be deceiving... Most newcomers tend to ignore the importance of having a secure wallet for their assets and when the time comes to spend those assets, they might hit a roadblock!
Mining involves using computers to solve complex mathematical problems in order to earn Bitcoin as a reward.
It's ASICs now!
Me and my friends once mined Bitcoin on a particular app I think the app is called Bitcoin mining.
This process of mining will take you a lot of time and is also data consuming you need to have a lot of data to do this.
Normally, it won't use a lot of bandwidth
[I'm blaming it on the app that you and your friends were using at the time (e.g. perhaps it was tracking a lot of stuff)]!