So why does currency exchange cost gold?

I mean yeah, when it came out it was a feature of Settlers and all, but why does it still need to cost gold now?

Why not have it as a normal POE feature for everybody to enjoy? Why does it need a downside?

Faustaus needs his cut. No one works for free.

It's an anti-botting measure.

If there was no gold cost then almost every currency on the exchange would be perma price fixed by bots.

Without a limiting factor, the flippers/bots can infinitely buy/sell which would impact the entire market. There is a lot of money to be made being a hideout warrior this league.

And there is no other way to solve this?

As someone who has actively used to the currency exchange to make LOTS of profit this league, the gold cost is a perfectly reasonable source of friction.

If you're not making enough gold to do normal trades on the exchange then you simply aren't playing the game enough to warrant trading as much as you do. In just an hour of mapping I can generate enough gold to do 16 hours of flipping. It really is trivial.

Is there something specific you are trying to do that seems inaccessible because of gold costs?

The people trying to make real money will abuse any system. You have to have seen the spam of messages selling divine orbs. No matter how fast they kill these they just create more. I suspect they are already abusing the currency exchange even with the gold costs.

You can still trade currency the good old manual way.

I'm honestly more annoyed that the gold has to actually be in your personal inventory. If I deposit all my gold for my workers to do their thing and then decide I want to trade some stuff, I have to go back to Johan and manually withdraw the gold first. It's so stupid.

I am amazed that people seriously ride the "We need gold to protect us from bots" train. As if a bot farm would ever run into a gold shortage while having multiple bots run maps for gold.
The only ones who'll ever be limited in any way by this are people because they can't farm gold 24/7, bots can and do AND at the same time use the exchange also 24/7. Anything that wastes peoples time with trivia is HELPING bots, not stopping them.