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I've read in an Article (https://www.coindesk.com/beacon-chain-contracts-a-new-way-to-deploy-dapps-on-ethereum-2-0) about the new Shards (aka beacon chain contracts) coming with Ethereum 2.0 and that every shard more or less represents its own Blockchain running within the Ethereum Ecosystem.

In other words, these beacon chain contracts would specify all the rules for computation and smart contract execution including transaction fees, associated gas costs, and more.

Also with that, it's possible to let run the Shards parallel and therefore every Shard has its own 'EVM'.

Instead of having one giant machine run transactions one at a time…we can split it up across tons of machines across the world and run them in parallel,” Jordan explained to CoinDesk.

But if the Shards are running parallel, doesn't this also mean that Miners can choose which EVM they are supporting and which not? Which might lead to the situation that complete Shards can be abandoned? Or does every miner support all shards and takes blindly transactions into his next block?

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  • ETH 2.0 uses proof of stake rather than proof of work, and therefore there are no miners to speak of, only validators. As Nate notes below, those validators are randomly assigned to shards for security purposes.
    – Tin Man
    Commented May 27, 2021 at 10:29

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The tl;dr is that no, validators can't choose which shards they validate. Validators are shuffled around between shards every 10 minutes or so and are randomly assigned a few shards at a time. The worst they could do is not add transactions to the blocks they're assigned to, but they wouldn't do that if there were pending transactions with a high enough gas price.

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Disclaimer: Not an expert here.

I think we can assume you can collect more block producer and transaction fees on a chain no one else is o. Thus as long as there are transactions to validate and they are worth of something economically, somebody should be able to jump in. However if the number of block producers falls, the security of the chain will become questionable.

A good write up of sharing problems, esp. unsolved ones, https://medium.com/nearprotocol/unsolved-problems-in-blockchain-sharding-2327d6517f43

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