but the essence of this price movement is not really baffling... if you think about the context of it... Am I missing something?
The problem is that fundamentals are weak at this moment. There is no mass adoption story in sight because the scalability problem seems far away from a real solution.
For the short term, I think bulls will do another try to break the ATH, because in the last bearish dump attempt $1000 essentially hold. But I see no real chance at the moment to break the ATH. The most likely outcome is that the rally breaks somewhere in the low 1100s and we crash again in the 9xx area - a classic double top in the making, although to confirm it we would have to go as low as $135 .. scary, but not impossible if there is no miner/developer agreement in the scalability discussion.
Wow.. you are putting a lot of emphasis as scaling as a fundamental's problem.
If you think about the matter, your supposed "scaling problem" has been quite extensively vocalized ongoingly since late 2015, and if you recall bitcoin's price was approximately in the mid-$200s at that time. I would not call the supposed "scaling problem" to be any worse since then, but like you acknowledge the price has already been close to the ATH within the past month-ish and has a decent chance of getting close to testing it again in coming days or weeks.
So your pessimistic prognosis does not even seem to be very well supported by actual facts, context and history. Furthermore describing another test (possibly failed test) of resistance in the mid $1100s as a double top comes off more as wishful thinking rather than any kind of true technical chart analysis.
I will point out that I would not be surprised with another meaningful (more than 15%) correction that would happen anywhere between $1050 and $1180 .. and even correcting from there into the $900s or below, yet you even seem to concede (by your seemingly stupid ass suggestion of $135) that those kinds of corrections would not be enough to get us out of our current and ongoing bull trend.
By the way, I am not suggesting that $135 is not a possible price, but such low prices would need some kind of real and material major event, probably even greater than an exchange hacking or maybe a forced hardfork could cause something in that territory?.. more realistic bear scenarios would probably have considerable difficulties bringing prices below $600 - and even then we would likely need some considerable combination of FUD and/or changes in the fundamentals beyond your stupid ass vapor fantasy suggestion of a supposed "scaling problem"