Hi, I am new to all this, but help me understand this. If there is a crypto coin that is very useful and has functional value, not just speculative, say it becomes very expensive. What is to stop someone from just creating their own coin that is the almost identical to it, and using it instead, so high prices are not paid for the other coin? How can all these coins maintain high values, when people can just create as many new coins as they want?
Nobody, really.
But it's not enough just to clone the coin. You have to convince people to switch to your new coin or at least use it: miners, exchanges, traders.
Good point. Rob31, you probably understand that it's not possible to pay with your coin instead of the original and pretend that it's the original. That's not possible, since your transactions won't be in the blockchain where the transactions from the original coin will appear and confirm. Thus, you can only make your coin a competitor of the former one, and to be able to use it you need to have it on exchanges, so that others use it as well. It's better not to waste time on cloning coins.