Like Satoshi said, "The price of any commodity tends to gravitate toward the production cost." Bitcoin and every other mined crypto has tended to prove this out over and over again over the long term.
I guess it also cuts backwards as well
So I could just as well say that "the cost of any cryptocoin tends to gravitate toward its market price"© (you can quote me on this). Really, the costs of mining are ultimately determined by the mined coin price. For example, if the price rises miners can raise their expenses keeping their profit margin more or less the same. In this way, if the price rises quickly, we should soon expect the costs of mining rise too since more miners will enter the competition. And this competition will necessarily reduce profits margins to a minimum, which means costs coming close to market price. As to me, this inference is more correct
Correct.
But again, only with mined coins. The premined/POS cryptos are fked, they have no mining floor to fall back on that is driven by supply/demand economics.