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.
Bull and bear these are the two sides of a coin and no one know that what will happen next. I think that some time its look bearish to us for example in current time, but to me I think that we are in bullish market because, even if bitcoin price is trading too much stable it is a good sing and we can call it a bullish trend because investors are confident not to sell their bitcoins.