I am reading this article by MEW and they mention that in period of BAT token sale someone paid $6k for transaction fee: https://kb.myetherwallet.com/gas/what-is-gas-ethereum.html, and they quote how transaction that costed $6k failed:
That's right. Someone paid $6000+ to send a failed transaction. Ouch, indeed.
What was the reason he failed? did he supply too small gas price with infinite gas limit or too small gas limit with enourmous gas price?
From the given chart, the failed transaction is a contract method call (notice the gas limit and gas used are much greater than the standard payment cost of 21,000).
Insufficient gas is one of the reasons for a contract call to fail. Even with enough gas, a contract method call may still fail, as part of the method's logic flow. Take an extremely simple example, a method can call revert to fail the current execution, if it determines the caller is not on a whitelist. See this question and this question for more discussions.
Having said the above, it would be interesting if someone is able to find out the hash of the transaction in question, possibly more details of the failure can be analysed.
