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.
If you are looking at the whole year chart of bitcoin or crypto market we can easily say that we are still on top compare to the previous year but if you see the chart this year we can say that bear market is the trend this year. $20k price of bitcoin might be a result of price manipulation but many people are trap on that level so this make investors trust fall also. This bear trend will end if theres a big good news out in the market.