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.
I propose to be one of those computers storing the accounts and transactions. In fact I propose to store your account and transaction information. So pay me 0.005 cents for storing your account and I will pay you 0.005 cents for storing mine and those two payments cancel each other out. I know that algorithm works for 2 nodes, I think it works for N nodes.

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.
You are proposing to charge the providers of the service, the nodes are the ones storing the information and providing this "luxury". They provide this in order to verify that the block chain is correct, which in turns provides security for those depending on that correctness.
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.
That person running the node is providing the storage, network transfer and CPU usage that you are proposing to charge them for. So now it costs them twice as much to participate. If Microcash needs money to defend itself, it is not secure. If a authoritative group needs to collect these funds then Microcash is not decentralized. The power, profit, and motivations becomes highly concentrated in the accounts with the most coins. Coincidentally, you control the most coins in the block chain at the moment. Or is it coincidence?