2018 has been one of the worst years if not the worst in the crypto industry. We had so many ups and downs
having ups and downs, or even generally downtrend is not considered a "bad year for bitcoin" because not everything is about the price and obviously as other user mentioned it was a great opportunity to buy cheap bitcoins.
not to mention that not all of the price drop was manipulation. only a part of it near the end was pure manipulation, the rest was a simple bubble burst and correction.
but we are still around
bitcoin is still around because it provides useful utilities and because of that each time its price is manipulated, it comes back up again.
We all thought we had reach a bottom around 6K until some few people decided to ruin everything for all of us. Gladly, their mission failed
considering their "mission" was to push the price below $6k you can't say they failed because we are currently below $6k!