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 !
White paper may not mention halving, but i want to believe that everything we are having today with the use of bitcoin has gone far beyond the constituents of what the whitepaper contains, people invest, hold, make profits, sells and buy, miners got half of block rewards, halving occurs and the likes, all within the system, the white paper may only contain about the protocol of how you can use bitcoin safely with its integration with the use of blockchain.