I agree to this, first four months went bad but we will see huge growth at the end. Once it reaches the $20000 mark, there will be huge media coverage and it will sky rocket from there on.
April was not exactly bad. It was not at all. To be more precise, month of January, February and March were part of bleeding market and I also dont consider dip as a bad time. Now people are wishing to see low price of bitcoin because they want to buy it while same people did not bother to invest in it when it was suffering from dip. At that time, everyone was like, bitcoin is about to die.
Obviously in the long run, bitcoin would go higher than it is now, since it obviously cannot remain stagnant. However, based on your last statement, we have to understand that the higher and higher this year that you have mentioned may not necessarily be the case.
As long as the market is concerned, we will get to see some pretty good sideways movement for the meantime, because we can even start thinking of a bull run that would set us up to a new level of ATH. We still have a lot of days ahead of us anyway. But we can be sure about new ATH to happen within this year 2018. Because when bitcoin will be having price levels near previous peak levels then more people will come to invest and adopt bitcoins. This is an easy prediction anyone can expect.