I'm not sure there's going to be a mini-bull market in 2018, the market has been down for almost four months, and a rally should be possible.
I believe we are not in a "bear market" in some sense. I think we were in a bull market and the prices went up really high however it dropped pretty quickly. Remember what the prices were before December ? Well we are just going steady, there was just this one crazy insane bull run but than it went back down to real numbers. If you consider it like "bitcoin was once $20k but now it is $6k" than you will be really sad and hopeless.
Nevertheless, if you see it like "bitcoin has been $6k for nearly a year except that one time in December when it skyrocketed and come back" you will feel a lot better because you shift the anomaly to $20k and not the bear market that dropped to $6k.
We are in a bear market and there is no way around that, a bear market is one where the prices fall and the investors begin to have doubts about their investment, the price went from 20k to 6k so we fit that part of the definition and many people are having doubts about bitcoin and if they are going to recover their money, so we fit the second part of the definition as well.