Of course you’re not mistaken. His understanding of the gold standard is on a par with his understanding of Gresham’s Law.
If you’re going to define a dollar in terms of gold what other measure would you use besides weight of the gold? Brightness, tensile strength, hardness? Obviously the weight of gold per dollar has to be specified for the gold backing up the dollar (the meaning of a “gold standard”) to have any meaning whatsoever.
Today, with the gold unmoored from an official amount per dollar, it moves daily in a free market. It could serve as a medium of exchange, but it’s just too inconvenient to do so, plus it suffers the same disadvantage as bitcoins; it’s price is quite volatile whereas a medium of exchange needs to be relatively stable in value from day to day for people to trust its use.
People can cheer on bitcoins as long and as hard as they want. Something as volatile in value as a bitcoin will never, ever, be accepted by the overall public as a preferred medium of exchange, i.e., as a currency.
Just to be clear. If the dollar were defined as a specific portion of an ounce of gold, the volatility would disappear. Americans [or any dollar-users] would buy and sell gold at the pegged weight.
It wouldn't change.