The thing is I have the transaction ID where I paid the address that we were supposed to pay. I swear I saw my name on the spreadsheet a few times too, but after I got pulled to my Business trip, I never really looked back. I got so swamped with life and work that this was just a forgotten thing. I guess I'm just trying to figure out where my 5.16 BTC went. I guess it went down the drain and I got screwed
I would normally say that you have lost your btc as you either need to a) demonstrate that you own one of the btc addresses that sent 5.16 to the group buy account by signing a message, or b) demonstrate that you own one of the bitcointalk accounts that bought 5.16 btc worth of chips. If you can't do one of those things, then the btc must have gone somewhere else, because as far as I'm aware, all of the btc that were received were accounted for.
Think about it - if you didn't have to do one of those things, then anyone could just post here and say "I sent 5.16 btc and then went on a business trip" - clearly we can't just start sending btc to anyone who says that...
Having said that, it seems there were four payments of 5.16 btc to the address but only three users that paid 5.16 btc on the spreadsheet, so you could be in luck (see transactions below).
In order to prove it though, I think you still need two things to happen in your favour:
1) The extra funds need to still be in the escrow address. If there are no extra funds in that address once all other payments are accounted for, your payment must have been refunded at some earlier stage.
2) JohnK should be allowed in to your mtgox account. This will allow him to verify that a payment was indeed sent from your mtgox account to the right address at a time that corresponds to one of the four payments below. Copy/pasted text or screenshots would not suffice here because you need to prove it is from *your* account that the payment was made, and screenshots are too easily doctored. In theory, anyone could check the blockchain (as I just did), notice there was an extra 5.16 paid that's not in the spreadsheet and claim it, so your mtgox transaction history is the only way to prove it was you who paid it, and this means someone trusted by both sides (JohnK) needs to be given your mtgox login details to verify.
Payments list:
https://blockchain.info/address/1At75rKd6e8b7S7AAPzZ5V3kAzhkGYhnpU?offset=0&filter=2Payments of 5.16:
https://blockchain.info/tx/48cfb99c9dbc1750b1319c6f2121302083359544acf42d8bb47a3852c41fcee1https://blockchain.info/tx/6d969e3931b6bf6c78b32833767c30c3176bc67cd620b52523dba28da00c5c3ahttps://blockchain.info/tx/cc6cbf7458df1fca4366bc1dbe2713d17b7aff3b3d916907491f3e879c00b37fhttps://blockchain.info/tx/bc4ed5d44166100127dfacf04ffbdc4385e5c1fe19325118e3c4666ec3421156one for 5.1 (just to show that the four 5.16's above are separate from GodFader's payment of 5.1)
https://blockchain.info/tx/bfa9d49db960463ec4ab4a981d6d3640249eb9d28e4ac313e6814beb04a1a7bbVycid - theoretically chip count should mean no one that is not on the list gets a refund. In practice though, if someone submitted funds, ragin didn't see them and JohnK ignored them and left them in the wallet... then they could be excluded from the chip count. In that case though, they should still have been sitting in the wallet.
It looks like there was somehow 5.16 left in the wallet after the chips were purchased that went to:
https://blockchain.info/address/16kbqtQNtLGvERubGS4QDmgLgv5fQAQcZyThis was the final payment out of the group buy wallet, and I'm not sure why it went there from the wallet.
Perhaps JohnK could clarify this - if those funds are sitting unclaimed in a wallet controlled by JohnK, then it might be worth logging into dmo580's mtgox account to verify that he did make the payment to the groupbuy address, as he may be the rightful owner.
scotjam