Bitcoin and the others in 2018 - are you satisfied?

I came to crypto world in December 2017 and January 2018 - that was the time when bitcoin and almost all alts were near their ATH and everybody predicted bright future for bitcoin and for the whole crypto world. Then first crash came on January 17th, mostly based on FUD about Korea and India banning bitcoin. We all know that since January there were several bullish trends followed by falls, the most signficicant in the beginning of February when BTC went to 6k. I tried to find any explanation for this and again many reasons came - China banning crypto, India wants tax crypto, Chinese new year ect. Then BTC moved again to 12k and everybody thought it will rise more, today we are back on 9k and alts bled even more - a reason? Nobody knows. In my short experience in crypto world I have to say that positive news have almost no impact on the price, but any negative FUD, fake news or anything like that just leads to really fast drop in price! Everybody says - it's just correction, it is healthy for the market, but I don't believe so! I think that the market was recently repeatedly manipulated by whales who just spread FUD, sell all their portfolios and use the panic sellers to make themselves rich overnight when buying back in the deepest DIP. This is far away from the original idea of decentralized cryptocurrencies that are not controlled by any government and so on - they are not, they are just manipulated by someone else. When I read this forum, most of you are very optimistic about the price and development of BTC, ETH and the others. Youtube is full of videos that XRP will moon to 1000 USD price and similar bullshit - if XRP would cost 1000 USD per coin, then the value of Ripple company would be 20x more then GDP of the United States. People just don't think things through! Everybody wants to be a millionaire overnight - mostly newcomers.

I hope that his post is not too negative, but I have to say that I'm littlebit dissapointed about crypto development this year. I'm a HODLer, so I will not sell my portfolio, I will just hold and wait for possible better future.

Do you agree with me? Or you are satisfied with BTC development in last 2 months?