To me it just looks like simple ignorance. I don't suspect malice.

Dude is old, probably not very computer savvy, and I doubt he even has much time to wipe his own behind with as busy as he is. Much less spend a chunk of the remainder of his time left looking into some new-fangled cryptogizmo on a computer that he hardly knows how to send emails on. Temporal preference; gold is his weapon of choice. He's familiar with it and he knows how it works. He stands to gain little (supposedly) from paying attention to Bitcoin.