It will be going sideways until LN is released.
Devs have been testing it and showing zero fees to buy coffee with bitcoin. If it is released, and turn out to be a success, price will go fast to 50k.
Right now, fees are more than 350k satoshis per kilobyte, for a one-hour confirmation. It's insane, and people would not move their bitcoins to a exchange to sell, nor will buy more, knowing most exchanges will use those same fees. Less sellers decreases the supply, but less buyers decreases the demand, that's why it is going sidelines.
This is indeed a big problem. I have some in a personal wallet that's been safe for a few years just HOLDed. Now I am thinking I could like to move some of it onto an exchange and trade back and forth with Eth for example, and possibly cash some out then buy back in later, etc etc...but the fees put me off - I refuse to pay double digits to move crpyto around when the whole idea was that it should be better than fiat and better than shares.
I hope LN comes out soon and works.
all my new money is going into ETH LTC XRP etc as you pay barely anything to move it!
They have to fix it if they want more big rises.
Cutting china out of the mining game may help lower difficulty