Phishing, scam, etc...I'm a noobe.

[LoyceV]

I went to a reputable btc transaction accelerator site and paid them $60 to help push the transaction through.  It confirmed in less than an hour after I payed him.  I am also leaving bitcoin and any new headaches from it behind.

As much as I like Bitcoin, I can't deny that current transaction fees and on-chain limitations are bad. Bitcoin can't grow without more users, which it can't handle because all blocks are full. My first Bitcoin experience was a good one back in 2015: I could make many transactions at a very low fee, which gave me a good feeling of how Bitcoin works. You can't do that now without paying a small fortune in transaction fees. And even if it's "just" a few bucks per transaction, that's too much just to try it out.

and/or to start learning about litecoin

Litecoin still has low transaction fees. For $0.01, you can make about 50 transactions. The good thing is that Litecoin works about the same as Bitcoin.

[Z-tight]

I am also leaving bitcoin and any new headaches from it behind. I was advised to get the electrum wallet and/or to start learning about litecoin.

Sorry about your experience, though it may be worth mentioning that it has not always been this way, we used to make tx's with 1 sat/vByte and get it confirmed without waiting for too long, but right now those people making ordinals tx are making BTC unusable because of the high tx fee it creates. There are layer 2 solutions if you would like to explore that area, though take note that it is not a complete solution to the problem, but a partial one. Hopefully the ordinals spammers get bored and leave, so tx fees can return back to normal.

[LoyceV]

we used to make tx's with 1 sat/vByte and get it confirmed without waiting for too long

I used to make free transactions, as long as one of the inputs aged long enough to reach "medium priority" in Bitcoin Core, and the total transaction was less than 1000 bytes. Those were the days, but unfortunately those days are long gone. The "input age" was removed as a consideration. That's too bad, because giving priority to aged inputs could actually be a good way to separate real transactions from spammers.

[Kakmakr]

Yea, the calculation of the fees has always been an issue for beginners. A few years ago, I was in a hurry to send BTC as payment and I just chose the maximum fee, without calculating the cost. (Electrum) ... so I ended up paying more than $1000 to send something like 1 bitcoin. (Miners were very happy to gobble that up in minutes)

You sometimes have to bump your toe to learn hard lessons, but I think your $60 was way cheaper than my $1000 fee.