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 !
If it wasn't mentioned it is because it wasn't important at all, halving is optional in the code, it depends if you want to make from the coin a finite or an infinite element, we have seen examples of coins who doesn't have halving and they work fine. A good example of this is Dogecoin.
Halving was necessary to limit the maximum supply, and it was a smart solution. If it wasn't mentioned in the whitepaper maybe it wasn't important to mention it for Satoshi.