The halving of bitcoin is indeed a dirty little trick hiding in the source code.
The bitcoin white paper misleads:
"The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins..."
Point being:
White paper does not mention halving !
Whitepaper isn't full or accurate detail of Bitcoin technical details. It's not like the whitepaper ever talk about address type, scripting or block size either. Besides, majority of Bitcoiner also aware what is halving, so obviously it's not "dirty little trick".