What if miners announced on the network the best PoW reached prior to finding the mined block?
This could kind of close the gap between "0 confirmation" and "1 confirmation". Anyone can check if his transaction is being worked on, because e.g. 50% of difficulty target reached indicate that some work was already spent on that.
For given TXID, the network would return a block containing that TX together with best target reached, so anyone can verify it.
The only problem with this is how to prevent overloading the network/miners with bogus requests/DoS.
This could kind of close the gap between "0 confirmation" and "1 confirmation". Anyone can check if his transaction is being worked on, because e.g. 50% of difficulty target reached indicate that some work was already spent on that.
For given TXID, the network would return a block containing that TX together with best target reached, so anyone can verify it.
The only problem with this is how to prevent overloading the network/miners with bogus requests/DoS.
And the fact that some miner somewhere happens to be working on your transaction, and happens to have reached an insufficient difficulty tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not your transaction will be included in the next block. Furthermore, the attacker could broadcast your transaction with an insufficient difficulty. This seems like a huge load on the network with zero benefit.
