Why exactly must people lose their money for participating in the currency?
Nobody has articulated that need to my satisfaction.
Because there is a cost involved in storing your accounts and transactions on hundreds or thousands of computers around the world.
It's free in Bitcoin, but there is a small fee in MicroCash for this luxury. Just because it's free in Bitcoin doesn't mean it's a scam to have fees for actual services. Just because one person runs a node doesn't mean everyone else around the network doesn't have to also store their accounts and transactions. There is a cost for storage, network transfer and cpu usage related to accounts, MicroCash has a fee for this so that it can protect itself from spam and so that the system self cleanses. If you don't like the daily half cent (0.005) fee then you don't have to use MicroCash. No one is forcing you to use the service.