Are the huge transaction fees mostly mistakes or some other market indicator? I am trying to understand why there are numerous days in Bitcoin's history that show huge transaction spikes.  See this blockchain.info chart. 


The Jan 10th, 2012 spike is due to a mistake by this guy.  I can't explain the other spikes.

Are these spikes mostly or all due to human error? Or are they some other indicator, possibly market value, global usage or popularity?  Maybe some think that paying a high fee is supporting the network.

The number of transactions can obfuscate the actual worldwide usage due to things like mixing services, automated transactions, spam.  Maybe the fees spent can rule those out and show the global adoption rate assuming those types of transactions would avoid fees as much as possible.

Bonus points if you happen to know what specifically caused any one of these individual spikes.  Having a list would benefit Bitcoin history story telling.
As mentioned, raw transactions are incredibly easy to screw up since you must explicitly pay yourself if you want change.

Here's a few scenarios besides unbalanced outputs which will produce huge transaction (Tx) fees:


forgetting to pay change
forgetting to convert to Satoshis in your code
misplacing the decimal (perhaps due to rounding errors)
swapping the fields using BCI or Bitcoin Core (this used to happen easily)
setting the Txfee variable in the core software on top of the built in Tx fee
a miner could spend time mining the current blockchain plus an additional non-broadcasted transaction with a high fee. If the miner succeeded, it would then broadcast and cause a spike in the graph. The miner wouldn't make any extra money, and it would be wasting time not contributing to a pool.