If I wanted to create my own altcoin, what is the easiest/fastest/cheapest way to do it?
By "create" here I mean a coin I could give to my friends, offer to trade for other altcoins, and store in a wallet.
So you are looking for ways to scam your friends or their money, more than 5000 tokens were launched in the past 24 hours on Solana, it depends on where you want to launch the tokens, there are tutorials on YouTube on how to do it on Ethereum, and I am sure there should be one also for Solana since both platform are the two big thing in the space for now. I won't advise you create one because you know nothing about blockchain
Yeah, the sheer number of new crypto coins popping up everywhere is pretty worrying. It seems like anyone and their dog can just whip up a new token these days and get it listed and with so many random altcoins flooding the market, it's tough for legit projects doing good work to stand apart. This opens things up for shady players running pump schemes and whatnot to swoop in and take advantage of folks who don't know any better.
I'd say a main reason for this tidal wave of tokens hitting the scene is how laughably simple it is now to generate coins on platforms like Ethereum or Solana. All these handy tools let any old Joe Schmo with a computer print money basically which obviously draws scammers like flies. So they make flashy whitepapers full of buzzwords, hype up their coin all over social media, get people fomoing in when they list it on some exchange that doesn't even vet projects thoroughly, then dump all their holdings once the price pumps and leave investors holding the bag. It's messed up but all too common nowadays unfortunately.