A solution could be as simple as a 'ping' message. I don't have a programming mind and I wont pretend to understand how the internal wiring or Bitcoin works in technical terms but the issue here is basically this "the block size is too big, by the time rest of the world uploads/downloads this mined block information someone else would get headstart"
Can't we simply send a proof of work 'ping' to the rest of the world. This 'ping' would carry an irrefutable proof that a block has been mined and ID's the block?? So the rest of the world can stop mining that block and move on. Theoretically this 'ping' message could be few bytes.
Couldn't this be done? Or is it way more complicated?
What you describe is called SPV mining. It means that miners skip the verification of the block and the transactions within, and immediately start mining a new block referencing the just-solved block header.
There could be many types of issues due to SPV mining:
- Since miners receiving only 'ping' & not complete data, they don't know what is in the last block, they have to mine without any transactions (except for the coinbase transaction), to be sure that they don't mine a block with
transactions that conflict with transactions in the previous block. This means they are not helping the bitcoin network at all!
- There were other issues like July 2015 fork which you can read about here :
https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=July_2015_chain_forks
