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
I guess that this is the reason why we have so many shitcoins in the crypto space today, an industry where anybody can wake up one morning and decide that they want to have their own coins. I don't know if there's any sort of regulations to maintain standards before accepting applications for creating crypto coins, so that the rate at which worthless coins and tokens are created will reduce. Example is OP wanting to create a cheap and easy cryptocurrency, to share with his friends and trade with other coins, without a business plan or experience, how do you think that such an altcoin will survive the competitive market? I think that people should try and learn from professionals, be mentored by successful people in the line of business that they want to venture into, even go the extra mile and take a course if possible, so they can really master the industry and how it works.