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You can read the whole thing on the Dashcoin thread on bitcointalk.org I'll keep things short. Since Dashcoin is a copy of Bytecoin, it was effected by the same bug found by the Monero team back in Feb and published in April. Dashcoin team then released a fix in May to all exchanges and pools, here are a couple of quotes from the bitcointalk thread:

Minergate are aware about the problem since 13 April (they integrated fix for Monero and Bytecoin), they got a separate fix for DSH since 9 May, and they get notified about the double spending less than 24 hours after it occurred on their chain.

They said their damage is 10000 DSH, we offered them 20000. The reply after was they have too much tech difficulties to roll back. That was 1 or 2 days after the split. Their next offer was to join their chain, but at the time there was already 17000000 DSH double spent on their chain.

Now their damage purely because of mining is between 150000 and 200000 DSH, and they cannot simply roll back because it will damage too much reputation.

After suspending Dashcoin payouts for a few days, Minergate finally released a statement which basically saying they decided to stay on the old chain and apply their own "fix" to it.

I have great doubt they would actually "fix" anything since they don't even have a GitHub repo for Dashcoin...

However, the problem is Minergate controls a majority of the hashing power of Dashcoin (145.9 kH/s Minergate 188.4 kH/s total, checked as I wrote this), and it seems like they got HitBTC on board too (Cryptopia seems like agree to use the new chain). So what they are doing is hijacking their miner's consensus and hashing power to stay on the their "fixed" chain, which results in a hard fork.

By July 6th

Original Dashcoin blocks: 762722

Minergate Dashcoin blocks: 781184

Chainradar Dashcoin blocks: 781136

Check block 781135 on minergate and chainradar, they are the same.

This is not even a hard fork, this is a pure hostile takeover, and most of their miners don't even know what is going on.

I stopped mining with Minergate since I found out about their bad reputation. But what this hard fork action implies, is much scary IMO.

Any thoughts on what is going to happen?

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I don't think we can blame Minergate for a bug in other organization's code... Like with all cryptocurrencies the blockchain with most users will win despite the question which of the branches of blockchain is officially sanctioned.

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    The valid chain with highest cumulative difficulty "wins". My understanding is that Minergate's chain is invalid due to double spends. So that makes the other one the longest valid chain.
    – user36303
    Commented Oct 18, 2017 at 17:10
  • I don't think users care about which one of the forks is valid as long as they get their coins. Switching to another fork is always a risk for users with low-end machines. Not everyone wants to run own full node for all possible coins as in worst case it requires 40 GB disk space per coin and syncing whole blockchain can take upto 4 days if not using fast SSD.
    – Mika Lindqvist
    Commented Oct 19, 2017 at 18:56
  • That is not the argument you made.
    – user36303
    Commented Oct 19, 2017 at 19:46
  • The argument I made was that people don't want to lose their coins they have earned since the forking. Minergate is well-known for being home for newbie miners who don't really care about all the technical details.
    – Mika Lindqvist
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 22:22
  • I meant the argument in your original post, obviously :)
    – user36303
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 22:46

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