We have to basically forget about miracle happening with price this year because it might not leave the bear mode. Lets start looking at 2019 which looks like opposite of this year.
2918 turned out to be a bad year for crypto. I know a lot of people that got involved in January but they lost a lot of money and vowed that cryptocurrency was a scam. I think this last quarter of 2018 will be good but I agree that it won't really take off until 2019.
2018 is not a bad year, it is just a downtrend which is normal and it is a good year as downtrend tends to give you the chance to buy lower, and I wonder why a lot of people see a problem with that. This is something they should be embracing, but because the market is speculative, prices are driven by speculations and manipulations, people tend to chicken out a lot of the time when they should be taking an advantage.
For what it is worth, I have always had it in mind that before we would probably start seeing some major recovery, it would be within 2020 - 2021 and since people will get greedy as well, I expect to see another rinse and repeat process until finally, we hit the mainstream adoption level.